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​I visited the Imperial War Museum in London. The picture on the left is the front of the museum; the big guns are from a retired battleship. It’s a fabulous museum that features equipment and weapons that I had read about but not seen up close. Who knew that they had “soup trailers”, pulled by Jeeps, that carried large caldrons of hot soup around to troop units? They also had the front half of a Lancaster bomber. It’s not as big as our B-17s and the cockpit would be cramped even for me. It was a significantly successful bomber and flying it was supposedly a dream for pilots, but the soup caldrons looked more substantial.
 
The Museum has a large atrium, about 5 stories tall, in which hung a Harrier fighter, a British Spitfire, a V-1 buzz bomb, and a full-size V-2 rocket. The floor exhibits included a T-4 Soviet tank and a twisted girder from the World Trade Center. Of real interest to me were scale models of the landing ships used to transport vehicles to the beaches of Normandy. My dad’s outfit would have ridden the Channel in transports such as those.
 
A new addition, the 4th floor led to a multi-story exhibit concerning the Holocaust, the killing of 6 million Jews by the Germans. My son and I had barely enough time to take it in, so I’m sure we didn’t get the full impact, but it had a few hundred pictures of the ghettos, the concentration camps, piles of murdered prisoners, and videos of interviews with survivors. Additionally, taking up a half-room, there was a 3D model of part of Auschwitz, showing where trains of prisoners arrived and were separated into groups of workers and non-workers. The workers were marched away to receive the striped uniforms with various badges indicating their category, taken to barracks, etc., while the non-workers (old men, women, children) were further separated in those that could be useful (women to serve in the factories or the brothels, children to be used for medical experiments) and finally into groups that would be led down the track to the gas chambers and crematoriums.
 
It was a sobering exhibit and had considerable impact on me. I have seen other presentations of the Holocaust, not to mention Schindler’s List and Band of Brothers, and have seen History Channel and PBS Channel presentations. I had already read about Dachau and the pre-war history of the Nazi campaigns, but being reminded of the horrors of the Nazi genocide was good. It presented an important side of World War II that should never be forgotten.
 
It’s too significant a chunk of history to miss, so I added a brief reference to the use of concentration camps in my current novel; it fit in well and helped the ending.
 
I’ve worked on my manuscript every day since coming back from Normandy and England. There was a big rush to add more “meaning” to it and I finally, to be truthful, had to admit that I had lost the story. I was trying too hard to emphasize the change that the main character experiences, and ultimately ended up with cumbersome and complicated words, dangling motives, and disjoint scenes.
 
I remember writing the blog about “meaning” and “motif” and the sympathy I had for my high school English teachers, but, sometimes, forcing something into a story makes it sound unnatural. Sometimes, it’s better left to the reader to find meaning rather than trying to blare it out.
 
In an inspired fit of simplicity, I yanked out the words and constructs where I attempted to create literature rather than just telling the story.
 
I am much happier. I now have told a substantial story of a man who becomes a soldier and follows along as he journeys through World War II and afterwards. There are things that prepare him for it, things along the way that affect him for good and bad, several unexpected happenings, and a finish that gives him perspective that helps him resolve the conflicts he felt.
 
I think that’s good enough.
 
I’m letting it sit for a week, will do another read through, and then will send it to my editor to read over Thanksgiving. If she thinks it’s worth publishing, then we’ll write up a contract and she’ll work on it over the Christmas holidays. She’s a high school teacher that does editing for the publisher, so she needs the holiday break to fit it in.
 
It’s time for a new set of eyes. Stephen King says that you should write the first draft of a new story with the door closed, then rewrite it with the door open, meaning that any story needs to be reworked with other eyes looking at it. I’m happy to move it along.

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