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I’m a bit of a history buff. I feel like it’s a good trait in a writer, and not just if you’re someone looking to set your tale in a former time and place. I think it’s good research into human nature itself.
Does that sound strange? Maybe so, if your experience of history is defined as “that class that put me to sleep in school.” Someone rattling off lists of events and the dates they happened so you can regurgitate them onto a test every so often isn’t precisely compelling stuff. It’s much more compelling if you go beyond the dates and get into the details, and the trials and tribulations of the men and women involved. “What happened?” can be an interesting question, don’t get me wrong. “Why did it happen?” tends to fascinate me more. What was in the particular psychological makeup of a Robert E. Lee or Catherine the Great or Archimedes that, combined with the happenstances of the Universe, made things turn out the way they did?
Of particular note here are the failures. The decisions of notable people which we, looking back on them from our Comfortable Armchairs of Hindsight (+3?) , find to be logic-defying and, not to put too fine a point on it, just plain dumb. This is where the writer’s mind, or at least my writer’s mind, starts to speculate. In the absence of pure practicality, what motivators could have been in play to cause Robert E. Lee, a man up until then famous for not throwing away the lives of men under his command, to order a suicidal frontal charge on the Federal position at Gettysburg?
Certainly Shakespeare was no stranger to the idea of dramatizing the lives and key events of historical figures, to where their motives made internal sense to the play even if the motives he came up with happened to be completely fabricated — Richard III was no more a deformed hunchback than Napoleon was a midget, and yet to this day we’ll nod knowingly when someone looks at a power hungry guy who happens to be short and states, “he’s got a real Napoleon complex.” That’s the kind of guy who thinks he can invade Russia successfully in the Winter.
But it doesn’t have to be on that global a scale, does it? Micro begets macro and vice-versa. It’s well known in the annals of psychology that a certain smell might evoke feelings of happiness in one person and dread in another, based on past associations. Going further than that, think about a smell such as chocolate which tends to be considered pleasing by humanity at large. Having a character in your story who remarks on how pleasant they find the smell of chocolate is not nearly as interesting a moment as a character who has a bad reaction to it. The latter defies our logic, or at least our “conventional wisdom,” and so we’re naturally intrigued at the anomaly.
Well, I am, at least — and hey, they’re always saying that you should write the things you want to read. So I like weaving up those skeins of the past for my characters and letting them surface every so often in the form of behavior that doesn’t quite seem level-headed. You have to of course establish a baseline first, but sometimes it’s the inconsistencies in their behavior that actually brings them to life.