Dwelling in the Past

Hello Lovely Readers,

I love to dwell in historical fiction in most everything in my reading, the TV shows and movies I watch, and my own personal writing. I am personally still a romantic about history and probably idealize it too much even though I studied history I know it is not clean cut and glamorous as I wished it was. One time I hear a quote "we study the past to know how we got here" (sorry paraphrasing so might be a misquote) and I think it is accurate. I like studying the past to know the struggles, the battles and the times of glory and hope people went through to get where we are now. Even though the stories I read are set in the past, if the book is written well, I feel I can relate to them and I wonder what I would do if I was in that circumstance?-- I know you can do this with really any genre of literature but there is something about historical fiction in that pulls me in.

I think I owe my love to early 20th century upon seeing Biltmore.

For my own writing there is a comfort in knowing the outcome. For example: In my story I am currently writing it is about WWI and I know what happens and I know who is going to win the War. But then there is this weird comfort in not controlling the outcome. I know what is going to happen in the grand scheme of things and I just put my characters in those events and seeing what happens to them and how they are changed by their circumstances.

My love of WWI might be owed to Downton Abbey

As I stated I am currently working on a story that will go through WWI. And while I studied early 20th century history in school I know vague details about WWI. I have read various novels, biographies and other non-fiction books and I sometimes I feel overwhelmed by the amount of information I am learning. I felt so overwhelmed I thought "maybe I should put this story aside while I research." But then I thought "I am never going to know enough to be completely accurate." This is true of all historians... we take the sources we have and as best we can we put a narrative. However, the thing about history is that unless we build a time machine we will never get the full story, which give historians and writers some freedom. So when I saw this post on Pinterest I was highly intrigued:

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And I felt it was okay for me not to know everything about WWI, that doesn't mean I can't attempt to write a fabulous story. So I will keep pressing on through my first draft. If I find out anything interesting I will keep you updated.