What We Can (Un)Learn From History
We all know we’re doomed to re-live the mistakes we don’t learn from history, but for writers, history becomes so much more interesting. The mind of an artist often works differently than others. When we learn about the military battles that ended wars, we’re also figuring out how things might have gone different. While most people read about the back room deals that make and break nations, we look at the personality types in the room, and wonder how history might have changed had their backgrounds gone just a little different.
History has a great deal for us to build upon while we work out our plots and characterization. It offers endless settings, and hundreds of other details that don’t have to come from scratch. After all, nobody wants to reinvent the wheel. There are civilizations all through time for the choosing: ones from forests, from deserts, from mountains. There are mysterious languages we still haven’t deciphered, calendars more accurate than what we use today, centuries old structures crafted based on advanced astronomical calculations. And for each of these things there are hundreds of “what ifs” we can ask.
For a writer, history doesn’t have to be accurate to be interesting. All those possible paths can lead us to another interesting story, another fun novel to write. We can drastically change history by giving a father to a leader who never knew his, a best friend to a woman who knew only hate and judgment. In some cases, the less accurate the better. To us history is just a large set building blocks waiting to be made and broken apart again.
Isn’t imagination great?
Tags: writing technique
