Uncomfortable Truths and Other Problems in Fiction

ADDENDUM: What follows is my original blog post from 3 years ago when my novel HIDING EZRA came out. As the commemoration of the centennial of that terrible war begins to wind down, I wish I could find a way to get the word out more to WWI history buffs who would enjoy knowing this small part of the war's history. It is real life--not black and white but gray, not easy but hard, not sunshine and roses, but gritty. The story is a reminder that so often the poorer working classes experience history's huge challenges in a much more life-changing way usually and react the way they do to those events due to economic realities for them. *********

BLOG post--
My novel, Hiding Ezra, is a fictionalized account of real life and history, set in the mountains of southwest Virginia during WWI. It describes the reasons for and consequences of a soldier going AWOL in the midst of that terrible war. Right from the start, I knew the book would generate unavoidable controversy.

There were people in the industry-both on the publishing side and in the film side-- who encouraged me to take advantage of the anti-war sentiment of the time ( back about 10 years ago when I began shopping the manuscript around) that had been stirred by the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. It would have been easy to give in to that; I probably could have sold the book for a nice advance and maybe gotten a film company interested, too.

But it would have been an assault on truth. The story I'm telling is literally true; it was my husband's grandfather who inspired the character of Ezra; though there are some key differences in the true story vs. my fictionalized account, the basic truth is preserved. You see, if you read Hiding Ezra, you'll see that the 175,000+ men who went AWOL during WWI were not political protesters or even "conscientious objectors" for the most part, according to my research, but were economic and personal victims of a very poorly conceived and executed set of draft laws and military policies.

Don't take my word for it about the poorly thought-out policies; look at what the government and military did to mitigate those errors before the WWII draft! You'll see that even they had to admit that these men and their families had been put in an untenable position. You can see that by how they dealt with most of those deserters and how they changed draft policy for the next generation!

My purpose in writing the book was not to glorify desertion or be anti-military or anything of that sort. I wanted to understand. To tell the truth. To tell larger Truths about human nature, about family, about how history is made by real people.....