Blood on the River
Blood on the River
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Elisa Carbone on Blood on the River
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.
Why she wrote it
A story worth telling, and a message worth sendingCarbone came to the Jamestown story not as a historian looking for a subject but as a writer who had already decided what kind of books she wanted to make. By the time she turned to the 1607 colony, she had a clear idea of what historical fiction could do for young readers that straight history could not, and she saw the events at Jamestown as the right vehicle.
I thought it was a fascinating, exciting story that I could make really interesting for young readers. Also, the reason I started writing in the first place was that I felt I had something to say to young people — I wanted to encourage them to follow their dreams, find the courage inside of them, believe in themselves, choose love over fear — and I felt that presenting those kinds of messages within the pages of exciting novels was the best way to communicate. So writing Blood on the River was another opportunity to send a message, while at the same time helping kids learn about the Jamestown colony.
thesecretdmsfilesoffairdaymorrow.blogspot.com, “The Secret Files of Fairday Morrow: Author Interview with Elisa Carbone”How she wrote it
Four thousand hours and a few days of hungerThe gap between Carbone’s contemporary fiction and her historical novels is not a matter of subject matter alone. She has described writing contemporary novels as a roughly six-month undertaking. The Jamestown book required a different order of commitment entirely, and she tracked the cost in hours.
It took me three and a half years to research and write Blood on the River. (My best estimate: about 4,000 hours).
thesecretdmsfilesoffairdaymorrow.blogspot.com, “The Secret Files of Fairday Morrow: Author Interview with Elisa Carbone”Carbone’s first move in any historical project is toward the earliest surviving records rather than the scholarship built on top of them. For a book set in 1607, that meant going back to the men who were actually aboard the ships, and she kept those accounts at the center of every decision about character and event.
I like to focus mostly on original sources rather than secondary sources because they have more life to them.
Working from primary documents shaped more than the book’s factual foundation. Because the colonists left written records, Carbone could track specific people across the whole arc of the colony’s early years, and she held herself to those records even at the level of individual scenes.
Yes, every one of the characters is a real person, and I followed their lives very closely, according to the original records (the writings of the men who were actually there). All of the major events in the book — and many of the minor events — were taken directly from these writings as well.
Documents can tell a writer what happened; they cannot tell her what it smelled like, or how the insects sounded before sunrise. To get inside the sensory world of her narrator Samuel, Carbone left the archives and went to the site itself, where she stayed long enough to let the place do its work on her.
I camped out in James Town (they have a camp ground there) and tried to experience what Samuel did, hearing the same insects at dawn and dusk as he did, even going hungry for a few days to see (a little bit) what it was like for him.
The English colonists were only half the story. Understanding the world that Powhatan’s people inhabited required a completely different kind of research, one that took Carbone out of libraries and into living communities. She attended pow-wows held by tribal descendants, visited a reservation, and interviewed tribal members and a chief.
I’d have to say that was the most interesting part of the research — to have the privilege of learning about the culture of Virginia’s Native Americans.
thesecretdmsfilesoffairdaymorrow.blogspot.com, “The Secret Files of Fairday Morrow: Author Interview with Elisa Carbone”That phrase, ‘the privilege of learning,’ is doing real work here. Carbone is describing access she had to earn, not data she could retrieve from a shelf. The Powhatan research was the one leg of the project that no archive could have supplied.
What she wants us to sit with
Love over fear, even in the oldest American storyCarbone’s investment in this book did not end when she finished writing it. While working on a sequel, she described returning to the world of the first Jamestown novel as a pleasure rather than an obligation, a sign that the story had stayed alive for her in a way that purely archival projects sometimes do not.
It was fun to think back to writing the first Jamestown book again, since I’m hard at work on a sequel right now. It’s great to be back in old James Town in my imagination!
thesecretdmsfilesoffairdaymorrow.blogspot.com, “The Secret Files of Fairday Morrow: Author Interview with Elisa Carbone”The choice to return to Samuel’s world, and to frame that return as something joyful, says something about what Carbone believes the Jamestown story still has to offer. Four thousand hours in, she was not done with it.