History for Writers

History for Writers looks at how history can be a fiction writer’s most useful tool, from worldbuilding to dialogue.

Size Matters

Erik5 Comments

150621NewfaneWe got married in my small home town in New England, population about 3,000. In preparing to go get our license at the town office, we had gathered all the necessary documents to prove that we were who we said we were, that we were old enough, that we weren’t already married, and so on. We were all prepared to fill out paperwork and turn the slow gears of bureaucracy. When we walked into the office, though, the town clerk looked at us and said: “Oh, Erik, I saw your mother the other day and she said you’d be coming in for a marriage license. I’ve got it right here for you.” That’s life in a small town for you.

Small societies and large societies work in different ways. Historians and anthropologists have terms for categorizing different sizes of societies: bands, tribes, chiefdoms, and states. Like all such divisions, it’s a simplification, but it’s a useful one for getting a handle on how cultures of different scales work.

Continue reading →

Food Production: The Original 99%

Erik

150615FarmingWe have some berry bushes and a few fruit trees in our back yard. Every spring I plant a few vegetables in a couple of small patches (some years they produce; other years they just wither under the care of my brown thumb). It’s nice to be able to go out back and pick a cucumber or a handful of raspberries, but it doesn’t sustain us. If we had to feed ourselves on what we can produce, we’d be dead in a matter of weeks.

The same is true for most of us in the industrialized world. In the modern west, only about 3% of the population is engaged in primary food production, which is to say: actually producing edible things from nature. Farmers, ranchers, and fishermen (along with some more niche specialists like bee-keepers and salt miners) are in a very small minority today. That 3% manages to feed all the rest of us, but only because of a host of modern technologies: mechanized farming, chemical fertilizers and pesticides, antibiotics, refrigeration and canning, cheap long-distance transport, and so on. Pre-modern societies had to feed themselves with none of these advantages, which means that food production required a huge amount of labor.

Continue reading →

Living on the Land

Erik2 Comments

A lone river winding through the desert. A pair of wide plains. A fragmented land of islands and mountain valleys. When you’re building a world, the land matters. The land we live in shapes the way our societies work. To see what this means, let’s look at a few examples: ancient Egypt, ancient China, and classical Greece. We’ll be zooming way out and looking at these cultures on a very large scale.

150608Egypt Continue reading →

History for Writers: Introduction

Erik

640px-Herodotus_plate_in_Volissos_entranceWriters of fiction and writers of history have long had a kinship with each other.

It is a telling fact that Herodotus, founding father of western historiography, saw himself as carrying on the work of Homer, the great epic poet. Herodotus himself has often been accused of being better at spinning a yarn than at getting his facts right, and Homer tells us quite a lot about the real warlords and merchants of his day through his stories of epic battles and heroic wanderings. Fiction and history have always sat at the same table. As a professional historian and an amateur writer, I’ve spent plenty of time thinking about how the two go together.

Writing fiction means imagining people and worlds that do not exist. That, in its essence, is also what the study of history is about. Now, historians must keep our imaginations grounded in testable evidence and rational argument, but all those facts add up to nothing without imagination. We will never shadow the emperor’s agents as they crept the back streets of Rome sniffing out agitators, or break bread with a gang of workers in the shadow of a half-built pyramid and listen in to their work-camp gossip, or watch over Confucius’ shoulder as one petty, corrupt, minor official after another slowly drove him to consider whether there could be a better way to live. Those people and the times they lived in are gone, and if we are to make any sense of the evidence they left behind we must try to imagine the worlds in which they lived.

Continue reading →