“The difference between the right word and the nearly right word is the same as that between lightning and the lightning bug.” ~ MARK TWAIN

I think I’ve made it pretty clear that I’m no longer a writer, so what am I doing administering a writing site? Well, that’s a leftover from a former life when I used to write like my hair was on fire. Those days are behind me. I’m left only with this site and a handful of wonderful friends who deserve better than to have the rug yanked out from under them, so this is what I do in my writer’s retirement, something akin to the busman’s holiday, methinks. What will I write about? Well, I didn’t spend six and a half decades at this without learning something, so allow me to pass some of those hard-earned lessons on to you. My treat.

Everyone in every field, from Olympic athletes to stamp collectors, has heroes, giants in the field who inspired and guided them on their personal journeys to wherever it is they roam. I recognize four, all of whom will be discussed at length in upcoming posts. Why? Why else, to serve as inspiration to authors coming up, established authors who have lost focus, and to get writers thinking about where they’re headed and how they’re going to get there.

The first of my four inspirations, the first face on my personal “Mount Rushmore” if you like, is Bruce Catton, an American historian best known for his books concerning the American Civil War. Known as a narrative historian, Catton specialized in popular history featuring interesting characters and historical vignettes in addition to the basic facts, dates, and analyses. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 1954 for A Stillness at Appomattox, his study of the final campaign of the war in Virginia.

Mr. Catton’s particular contribution to my writing journey came in the form of his talent for making a collection of words add up to more than the sum of their individual worth. Here, by way of example, is an excerpt from Mr. Lincoln’s Army, the first book of his trilogy describing the opening encounter of the second battle of Bull Run:

The road led straight ahead, like a white dusty arrow, and General Gibbon trotted on in advance to the top of a little rise, where he pulled up to see if he could see anything of the leading brigade. It had vanished, and Gibbon glanced off to the west, to the left of the road. The ground was more or less open there, and it rose in a long, gentle slope; and as Gibbon looked, he saw several slim columns of horse — roving cavalry, most likely, he told himself — come trotting out of a grove on the hillside, half a mile away. He was just beginning to speculate on whether this cavalry was Federal or Confederate when all the little columns swerved simultaneously, presenting their flanks. At sight of this familiar maneuver something clicked in the mind of this young general who had always been a gunner: that wasn’t cavalry at all, it was field artillery going into battery!

Gibbon sent an aide galloping back to the rear of the column to bring up the brigade artillery — Battery B, 4^th U.S., the one Gibbon himself had commanded before he became a brigadier of infantry. The aide had hardly started when six shells came screaming over the road to burst in the woods off to the right. The colonels of the four infantry regiments, without waiting for orders, swung their men into line facing to the west and got them off the road and had them lie down under cover of a low bank. Battery B came clattering madly up the pike in a cloud of dust while another salvo from the hostile battery crashed into the treetops. As he cantered into a field west of the road to post the guns Gibbon noticed with approval that his soldiers, although they had been taken completely by surprise, did not seem to be nervous. Perhaps half a dozen men, out of more than eighteen hundred present, had scurried hastily off into the woods when the first shells came over, but they were coming back now with shame-faced grins to rejoin their comrades. Battery B came up, the men tore down a rail fence to make a gateway, and the guns went lumbering into the field beside Gibbon, swinging around and unlimbering with the sure precision of the regulars. In a moment counterbattery fire had been opened.

Up to this point nothing had been seen of the enemy but his six guns. The natural supposition was that they were horse artillery attached to Jeb Stuart’s cavalry, engaged in cavalry’s favorite practice of harassing infantry on the march. The logical thing to do was to shake a line of infantry out to chase the guns away, and this — after a quick study of the ground in front — Gibbon proceeded to do. The 2^nd Wisconsin and 19^th Indiana moved forward from behind the protecting bank, broke through a little belt of bushes and scrub trees, and started out across the field to make the Rebel battery cease and desist. … The lines were formed presently and the men went forward, a fringe of skirmishers in advance, and they came to the top of a low ridge. The Confederate artillery suddenly ceased firing, and a line of gray-clad skirmishers rose from the grass in front of the guns and began a pop-pop of small arms fire. Then, from the woods beyond, a great mass of Confederate infantry emerged, coming down the slope to give the westerners their first trial by combat, red battle flags with the starred blue cross snapping in the evening breeze — Stonewall Jackson’s men, whose measured conviction it was that they could whip any number of Yankees at any time and place, and whose record gave them tolerably good reason for the belief.

And a long, tearing crackle of musketry broke over the shadowed field, and the Wisconsin and Indiana boys learned what it was like to fight.

Catton goes on his flowery prose to describe the battle, and how these green recruits earned on that day the title of “The Iron Brigade,” perhaps the most respected and elite unit of the United States Army for many decades afterward. I’ve read this passage and the ensuing story dozens of times, and I still get teary-eyed. This is what I strive for in my own writing, to bring goosebumps to your forearms or a chill to your nape, or maybe both. I present for your inspection a scene from Flight of Heroes, an unpublished work I collaborated with my daughter on a couple of decades ago; unpublished because we ran down long before the trilogy was completed.

In this scene, the Canis-Lupus or “dogs” are the villains, evolved anthropomorphized wolves, who are in the process of conquering the known world using newly-developed blitzkrieg tactics. Troclarr is their ruler and Veszio is his general. The Uigs are brutish humanoids fighting for one of their main cities.

The city of R’Jukan writhed in the grip of war. House to house, room to room, pitched battles were fought between groups of a dozen soldiers at ranges too close for effective employment of the crossbow, their outcomes deciding the possession of a supply route or the tenability of a flank.

In this most vicious of all forms of fighting, the Dogs discovered the Uigs’ secret weapons: The well-known tenacity of the stout, powerful manlike creatures, and the unexpected destructive power of the “hammers.” Bamboo-like tubes of the nittedal plant were cut, drilled, and filled with an exploding powder the Uigs had used for generations in their mining operations. When a short fuse was lit and the tube thrown into a room, the hard, jagged splinters thrown by the resultant explosion filled the room, butchering all within.

Canis-Lupus responded with fire, filling a small animal bladder with a jellied oil product, lighting its fuse, and throwing it hard against a wall to splatter its contents for yards around, burning anyone it hit and flushing any occupants from the area. For both sides, axes, swords, and daggers dispatched the survivors with brutal efficiency.

In this atmosphere were the fates of nations decided, and it came as no surprise to Troclarr to find Veszio’s command wagon in the thick of it, within a city block of the front, in fact. The wagon was as large as a small home, the open wheels a Dog’s height tall, and it was drawn by four dombrads, the huge, passive herbivores found far to the southwest where seasonal rain and a gentle climate brought easy living and bred big, lazy plant eaters. The slow-witted creatures weren’t suited for use in battle, but the Dogs had subjugated them to their will, as they tried to do with everything they came into contact with, and they released hundreds of draftsmen for employment as soldiers.

Ignoring the kneeling salute of the heavily armed guards, Troclarr bounded up the steps.

“Veszio!” he shouted, stepping inside.

“My Lord Troclarr,” Veszio’s chief of staff replied, startled, looking up from the map he was studying, a finely detailed rendition of an area of city streets. “The General has gone to the front.”

“The front? Does he wish now to be a foot soldier?”

“One of the platoons is having a problem with a particularly well-entrenched stronghold. He has gone to see if his presence will inspire the pack to overcome it.”

“And he will return when?”

“He didn’t say, Sire, but it could be—“

“…and move that supply route two blocks to the west!” came Veszio’s voice, roaring orders from the street outside. “If those human mercenaries find it where it is now, there’ll be hell to pay!”

“Well, now,” the chief of staff finished.

“Captain,” Veszio called down from the railing right outside the door, “send a platoon to shore up that line north of the square. That’s supposed to be a holding action. I expect it to hold!”

“Yes, sir!”

“Doing the job of sergeants now?” Troclarr greeted him as he threw the curtain back and stepped through the doorway.

I leave it to you to determine how well or poorly I channeled the Master in my description of a fantasy battle, but the point is that Bruce Catton led me to this juncture, and this is the man I was trying to measure up to as I wrote that scene and many, many more that have been dependent on action over my writing career. And how about you? Do you have any idols who brought you to the written page, or taught you in their own work what quality writing looked like? Why not scroll down to the comment section and join the conversation? I’d love to meet them!