History--Another Idea Generator
September 20, 2018

In the past few weeks, I've shifted from reading business books to reading
history--Sherman's Civil War memoirs, a Chinese book called Guwen Guanzhi--and
that's got me thinking about how useful history can be for a writer. The
potential uses I see include:

Pre-packaged Plots. Human history is filled with events, both great and small,
that can be used to form the nucleus and plot of a story, including science
fiction and fantasy stories. Marriages, alliances, wars, travels,
explorations--all are potential source material useful for creating a plot.
Whether you're looking for a single event or a long sweep of centuries, a
potential plot line can be found in just about any history.

Ready-made Characters. Along similar lines, many earlier histories, especially
Greek and Roman ones, tended to focus on how a single person dealt with the
important events going on around them. These history-biography hybrids provide
descriptions of their subjects' characters, down to their habits and quirks,
their likes and dislikes. (In the case of Herodotus, he sometimes did this with
entire peoples.) Change the name and gender as necessary, and you have a
ready-made character to drop into your plot. Another possibility, good for both
a plot and a character, would be to take someone who was only a minor player in
some historical event and make them the main character in a story about that
event.

Other benefits are harder to describe in two-word phrases. If you intend to set
a story in a particular historical setting, reading histories written during and
immediately after your selected period will give you background knowledge about
the setting. That, in turn, will give your writing extra depth--even if what
you've learned never makes it onto the page. (Though to be honest, just about
any time a writer knows more than what they put on the page, the writing has
extra depth.)

Finally, while you don't want to consciously imitate the writing style of a
bygone era, reading history written in and around your selected time period may
also give your prose just an echo of the sound and flavor of the writing of that
time--especially the dialog.

So if you're stuck for ideas or want to improve a work in progress, pulling a
history book from the shelf and leafing through it might be just the thing to
do.

(c) 2018 by Andrew Gudgel 
email: contact [at] andrewgudgel.com