CRV: Historical Story: Confederate

Howie Burbidge:

This was an awesome assignment.  I learned a lot about the advantages of having a partner to work with when writing a script.  There is no way that I would or could have come up with something even remotely this good without having someone to bounce ideas off of and to get ideas from.  It truly is so helpful and makes stories and characters so much more interesting.  Speaking of characters, we worked hard on our main character.  He is in direct line of current political on goings at the time of the Civil War.  As a Confederate spy his beliefs are shown through his behaviors—and profession.  This correlates directly with the current political climate at the time.  Our Confederate spy enters a wartime mansion of General Grant.  The information we gathered about these locations was pivotal.

(http://www.oldhouseonline.com/preserving-a-civil-war-landmark/ & https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherry_Mansion)

This house would have been a perfect place for spies to linger around and maybe even sneak into during the war – as it was only seven miles away from enemy territory and General Grant and his generals stayed there.  The house proved to be the setting of our script and made our story more believable.  We chose this location carefully because of that very element of actuality.

Spencer Plewe:

The plot depended on this character maintaining his cover for as long as he could, as well as how his cover is blown. We needed a flaw in this spy’s plan that would expose his deception to General Grant, so we found a personal piece of his history, namely about his name being a moniker from his actual birth name.

(http://www.history.com/topics/us-presidents/ulysses-s-grant)

It was the perfect touch of detail that many people wouldn’t know about, as well as the Confederate spy in the center of the story. The story itself was actually simple to write, so long as we had a definite direction and ending to take it to. We decided off several possible endings, and the resulting one felt the most natural.

Using details in historical fiction is exemplified from Neufeld’s After the Deluge comic, which places fictional characters into the real world of Hurricane Katrina; before, during, and after the storm. The fictional characters give a mode of safety in learning about real situations, and even semi-autobiographies such as Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis give a simple, narrative glimpse at the past.