Writing With History

This originally appeared as a post in August 2011.

This post is drawn from my recent speech at the Library of Congress; given that it was a 45 minute speech, I’ve altered and split it across two posts for readability. Enjoy! –Leona

What is history? Is it knowing dates, like July 20, 1969, or July 28, 1929? (Do you know what those dates are? I bet you know the first one…take a minute…yep. 1969: Armstrong walks on the moon.) The second date is a little more obscure: Jackie Kennedy’s birthday.*

History is made up of a lot of dates, some more obscure than others. Dates are important: the model year of your car is an important  historical fact. So is your mother’s birthday. Hang on, I’m not saying your mother is ancient! Put down those rotten tomatoes, please. Your mother was born and raised during the times that your kids are or will be reading about in high school textbooks. That makes her a part of history. My mother certainly is–she was born in Czechoslovakia in 1941; my father’s family comes from Russia. I was raised to distrust “the herd mentality”, to think for myself, and to view charismatic leaders with active suspicion.

The most intriguing bits of history, for a writer, aren’t found in a high school textbook. It’s found in the corners and crevices of events. It’s found in books like Salt, by Mark Kurlansky, and A History of the World in Six Glasses, by Tom Standage. Books where the authors have done massive amounts of research and then not only condensed, but focused their approach to the most relevant part: not so much when the events happened, but the people who drove those events.

History isn’t just about dates, your mother’s birthday notwithstanding. History is about people. History is about people like my mother, and grandmother, and great-grandmother; about people like you, and your families. It’s about people none of us have ever met: Marco Polo, Ivan the Terrible, Nixon, Rosa Parks…even Elvis. They created history. They are history. What they did and the reasons they did it, how they lived and how they died, still matter to us today. Whether we’re drinking coffee out of cups handed down over the generations or sprinkling black pepper over our food, we’re actively engaged with our own history every single day in dozens of ways.

When you write fiction, fantastical or otherwise, the characters have to operate in a framework of believable history–and believable rests not on what happened in our world in 1969 or 1776 or the year 0, but on what human nature renders possible and probable. Even if the point of view character is a werewolf, vampire, or four headed alien spider, there are certain aspects of that character’s basic nature that absolutely have to correspond to human nature in order for that character to connect with the reader–because our readers are human. (Last time I checked, anyway!)

Even a non-human cares about issues such as their own life span, the well-being of their children, what the food they eat tastes like, what decorations they hang on their walls. Even a non-human  knows the difference between yesterday and today and tomorrow, and remembers stories passed down through the generations, and looks ahead to the future of their children.

If they don’t understand the difference between past, present, and future, at the very least, then they have no claim to intelligence. Period. Not by human measurements, anyway, and as I just said–your readers are human. To tell an engaging story means to connect with your readers, which means leaving them some points of similarity to connect with. That’s why writing about cats and dogs and horses requires giving them a human overlay–anthropomorphize is the fancy word.

So how do you use those connecting points to develop a history for your fantasy world that shows your characters are intelligent and complex people?

Start basic. Figure out what the calendar year the action in your story takes place–let’s say the year 600, for the sake of this example. Decide what the basic tech level in the year 600 is. Stone castles and peasants in the fields? Space age? Post-apocalyptic? Anything is possible. This is your fictional world.

Now look at the year 0. Remember that the zero year is not when humanity emerged from the swamp, trees, or caves. The year zero is when something happened to reset the clock. There might have been a world war that wiped everyone out. They might have settled on a new planet. They might have had a major religious schism, and one sect followed the old calendar and the new sect started their own calendar. A king might have issued a decree. Anything is possible here as well. Pick out what the tech level and overall politics were in the year 0.

Then compare the two dates. Has the tech level risen in the intervening years? By how much and how fast? Steady or sudden jumps? Did it backslide into barbarism, and if so, why? Tag your time-line with the really big events that affected the majority of the world.

Now figure out how well-informed your characters are about their immediate local surroundings. If they grew up in Bababasburg**, is it a major town or a tiny village? What is the Most Important Event that has ever happened there? How long ago did it happen, and are the effects still rolling through the town? How much do your characters know about this Important Event?

For example, the action in my Children of the Desert series only runs across about three years, but the events that drive those three years go back hundreds. In the beginning, the main characters (Idisio and Alyea, in Secrets of the Sands), know that there have been a procession of mad and unstable kings on the throne in Bright Bay lately, but they don’t know what’s been causing that situation. As the series progresses, they see more and more of the backstage events, and realize that a thousand years of history have been building to the current crisis point; but in that first book, all they want to do is survive the problems they’ve been dumped into. Because they’re largely ignorant of the backstory all around them, they keep making stupid mistakes; as they grow more aware of history, their choices get smarter.

(And because most people don’t actually sit around and give long monologues about history to keep some stupid twit from getting themselves into trouble, there’s no infodump along the way. During a crisis, people in the know tend to tell the ignorant stuff like: “Just do it my way and shut up. I’ll explain later.” Of course, later is a hazy term….)

….speaking of which, this blog post is already running very long. I need to stop here and pick up the thread again in the next post (currently pending). In the meanwhile–keep writing, and keep laughing–because being creative is the best damn job in the world!

* Tom Doyle was kind enough to tag me on my original, incorrect “obscure date” reference during the Library of Congress version of this speech–so I’ve changed to another obscure date and actually fact-checked this time. Lesson learned.)

** Fictional town; don’t go trying to find it on the map. Just in case that wasn’t clear…. *grin*