Best Road Map to Imagination is a part of History

I’ve already mentioned the entertainment inherent in history. Many will read that and say, perhaps quite forcefully, “This guy’s a nut!”

Ah contraire, the entertainment is there.

The problem is in how it’s been fed to us. In order to ensure that students have actually studied their lessons our education systems demand thatwe memorize, and later enter in tests, the year that something happened. In truth, the year doesn’t matter except in its relation to, and thereby its effect on some other event.

For instance, Jacques Cartier apparently arrived in the New World in the area that is now known as Montreal in 1535. That date was probably important to Champlain who later used Cartier’s information and lived in the area for some time, but for me it doesn’t mean too much. Did the Iroquoian bows make their ancient firearms look puny?

There was undoubtedly some laughter.

How many people actually believed Cartier’s stories when he returned to France? How many didn’t believe him but used those stories anyway to create money for themselves? … Much the same as speculators do with stocks today.

In 1614 Champlain received, from France’s King Louis XIII, ten years of exclusive trading rites for furs from New France.

Just a minute! That’s like someone having exclusive rights to sell all the diamonds produced in North America.

What did Champlain have on good King Louis?

My point is, when someone tells you that one of Champlain’s men, Br?l? spent 20 years among the Huron; kick your imagination into gear. Such information about an 18 year old moving into the bush with what the Europeans of the day thought of as savages raises several questions.

Use your imagination.

All this is why I generally write historical fiction as entertainment. First I agree that if we don’t learn from history we will repeat the same mistakes. Even knowing the history we’ll make the same mistakes, but hopefully less often.

If we don’t have some entertainment, however, it’s often difficult to get through the learning phase. Besides, just the facts of a historical event can be very boring as can the life we are all living without entertainment.

So far I’ve had ‘The Great Liquor War’ and ‘Partners’ and hope to soon have ‘Homesteader’ out and, perhaps by the end of ’09 I can have ‘The Yearlings’ released. They are all historical in some respects. To some degree,they all contain historical content .

Read more about Fiction and Entertainment in fiction

If you are publishing your books online and need free traffic - to get real readers - please visit the hyperlinked site for more details about how you can get traffic.