Sharpening Knives Takes a Very Long Time (by Shelley Costa)

We’ve all had the experience—during that ruminative pre-story stage—of something catching us like a bramble during a walk in the woods. It took five years and plenty of brambles before I had what I needed to write “The Knife Sharpener.” One bramble was Jennie Wade, the only civilian casualty during the three-day Battle of Gettysburg. Jennie was kneading dough in her sister’s kitchen when a bullet found her on the third day. This interested me.

As time passed, it became clear—or what we mistake for “clear,” early on—that I wanted to exalt the poor bread-baking Jennie by making her (somehow) the reason Jeb Stuart was off raiding the countryside instead of being more usefully present at the start of the three-day battle in Gettysburg. I wanted to suggest that Jennie was possibly responsible for the Union’s winning the battle. But over time, other brambles caught at me: I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how the twenty-year old Jennie managed it, for one, and for another . . . I didn’t particularly like her.

We all know how stuck we get with a new idea, an original concept, the story as it first appears to us out of the mist. There’s a bit of love-at-first-sight about it, so it takes a lot of maturing before we can even think about letting it go. We fight to make some of it work. Did I have to reveal how Jennie managed to send Stuart and his cavalry off raiding somewhere? Maybe I could just imply it? Maybe she wasn’t accidentally shot after all, but, oh, she was a double agent, and assassinated by one of those Confederate sharpshooters who found her out? I didn’t like it, no sirree.

And no matter how I tried to exalt Jennie, nothing felt true to me—even if it was fictitious. What became truly and finally clear about the original concept was that it was oddly inert and uninteresting, despite the history-making three-day battle. I could add a lot of backstory, but for a short story, that’s risky in terms of pacing. All I had was the image of Jennie being shot dead in her sister’s kitchen while she (strangely) stuck to her routine of making bread. Where was the action of the story? Where was the development of my characters?

I was stuck. I was finally ready to come at my Gettysburg story from a different angle. But I didn’t know what that angle was. For a good couple of years, I mucked around in what felt like a need to do justice to all three days of the Battle of Gettysburg. Maybe, rather like Jeb Stuart, I was off raiding the countryside of my own mind, looking for material. For some reason, I felt responsible for putting this nation-changing event fairly and grandly on the page. But, all in ten or twenty pages? Really? Yet another bramble. A bramble bush. Something I had to let go.

And then, finally, one day I came across Tillie Pierce, fifteen years old at the time of the battle, who, twenty years later wrote a 100-page memoir, “At Gettysburg: What a Girl Saw and Heard of the Battle: A True Narrative.” After I read it, I knew I had my central character. It had a walloping bit of irony right up front: to keep their daughter Tillie safe, the Pierces, who lived in town, sent her three miles down the road to stay at the farm of friends – at the base of Little Round Top! Tillie had been sent right into the thick of the battle, comforting the dying, witnessing amputations. What could I do with this wonderful girl?

Slowly, Tillie’s story came to me, and the brambles lost their will and fell away when I brought a jaded, club-footed knife sharpener to Gettysburg. I had my story, but not yet my point of view, and what I managed to save from the first idea was a sense that heroism isn’t always pretty. . .or even very public. What I found, when I relinquished the first idea, was a far greater theme, one that matters to me. Over these five years, I toured the battlefield (still need to return to walk Pickett’s Charge), and when in Brunswick, Maine, for family events, I lay flowers on the grave of Joshua Chamberlain, the commander of the 20^th Maine Regiment that saved Little Round Top for the Union that day. Finally, all the pieces I needed for the story fell into place. And even Jennie Wade figures in it.

After five years, I wrote “The Knife Sharpener” in one week.