"At Tar Valon, some stories said, great armies had clashed, and the streets ran with blood... no; (she) had closed her hand, and those who survived among the rebels groveled at (her) feet. There had been no rebels, no division.... some tales said (they) had been bound to him, bound to (them), yet few believed that, and those few were ridiculed... Across the nations, the stories spread like spiderweb laid upon spiderweb, and men and women planned the future, believing they knew truth. They planned, and the Pattern absorbed their plans, weaving toward the future foretold." -"The Path of Daggers" in the Wheel of Time
I think the first time the idea that history is not an objective, inert set of collective facts hit me was sometime in college (the combination of naivety, Catholic upbringing, and going to college created quite the setup for hard realities.). As part of my Catholic upbringing, I had learned that the Spanish Inquisition, for example, was a period of... let's call it learning for the Catholic Church. I never questioned the origin story of the Catholic Church, never believed for two seconds that many of its customs and rites had emerged to absorb--not outright replace--pagan rituals and Roman holidays. Suffice to say, all that changed in the four years after, and the topic has fascinated me ever since.
There's a very real element of power and political sway to why history is presented a certain way. If you control a nation's narrative, for example, you control how its children are taught, what they value, and to what degree they might sacrifice for the nation's greater good. That is a battle absolutely worth fighting, and it's one that we see playing in the USA right now. (To be honest, it's a battle that's probably always been fought in the USA; it's only been in the last 10-15 years that I've become cognizant of that.)
But as a character-first and world-second writer, I'm much more interested in the personal history we create for ourselves, the stories we choose to believe, and the reasons for the history we gravitate toward. In the "Wheel of Time" quote I started this blog post with, the part that interests me most is "men and women planned the future, believing they knew truth." It doesn't talk about how Altara or the Aiel saw truth (though that's of course implied), but instead, men and women, as in, individuals. Why?
Let's start with the history I tell myself.
My Personal History
Another part of that quote that intrigues me is how the people of "Wheel of Time" aren't living their lives, reflecting, or transcribing the past, but are planning the future. I'm sure anyone reading this has heard some variation of the quote "to know the future, study the past." That's very true in that human behavior and human psychology hasn't changed over the centuries, but our own pasts are limited to years, decades at the most.
When people ask me about my goals for the future, my quippy response is to say the revolve around the three "F's"--fantasy, fitness, and family. I think it's instructive to say why those are so relevant to me by looking through the lens of history.
Fantasy: I think there's absolutely something to be said for the idea that you simply know your life's calling when you experience it. You might put it away as "unrealistic," you might even never get around to it, but it's like a black hole of gravity; every time you so much as circle around it, never mind approach it head on, you feel pulled to it. But there's also some undeniable facts about the fantasy genre that likely played a major role in my love for the genre.
The very first video game I ever spent hours upon hours playing, not just became the gameplay was great but because the story hooked me, was Final Fantasy VI (III when it came out in the States in the 90's). Other games, like Super Metroid, Super Mario Brothers, and even The Legend of Zelda were extremely fun, but no story had me so curious to learn its plot and characters like FF6. What would have happened if the first game to pull me in had more of a sci-fi bent? Or had its roots more obviously grounded in a real-life era, the way Clair Obscur is so obviously rooted in La Belle Epoque in France? I don't know that it's obvious I'd still gravitate toward magic-heavy, existential-questioning fantasy like I do now.
Fitness: Many who see me now would say I'm probably too zealous of a fitness fanatic. My yearly "big race" is a 24-hour ultramarathon, and even my "normal" races tend toward daytime ultramarathon Spartans or Tough Mudders. It's honestly a part of me that will probably be stepped back from as fantasy and family become more prominent.
What they don't know is that what I weigh now is the least I've weighed since probably 7th grade. What they don't know is the shame I felt when I never tried out for football for fear of embarrassing myself, the disgust I felt with myself for never winning a JV wrestling match my freshman year, or the years spent looking in the mirror wondering why I was still over 200 pounds.
In this case, my fitness history is one less defined by the appreciation of experience and more driven by the fear of returning to what was. I've always found it fascinating that for a lot of the people I know who were Division I athletes or even just really good high school athletes, they aren't as zealous about being "elite" anymore; they summited the mountain, they know what it's like and what sacrifices it took, and they don't feel the need anymore. Conversely, the number of people who run the same 24-hour race as me who share a similar story to mine is remarkable. I don't know if it's something about fitness in particular, but I find it difficult to believe I'd still be striving for race personal records at age 38 if I wasn't maximizing my athletic potential at 18.
Family: I grew up in a family of five, the son of parents still happily married over 45 years in, the brother of two sisters I still speak to regularly. As a kid, I just assumed this was the norm and something I was expected to emulate when I became an adult.
I now realize how abundantly lucky I was and am to have this home environment.
It used to befuddle me when someone didn't want kids if they didn't have health conditions preventing it. But as I better understood their stories--broken homes, divorced parents, married-but-cold parents, estranged family members--I realized that their familial history wasn't something they wanted to repeat. Why would you pass on the cycle of your family's history to the next generation if said history was filled with screaming matches, affairs, tearful weekends, and vows to never speak to each other again?
Across all three spectrums, history has played a role in who I am. The history of joyful experiences, of self-loathing, and of a home environment all made my three "F's" my main one "F"--my focus.
As an artist, how does that translate to my characters?
My Characters' History
I just briefly touched on it above, but I think one concept that's really important in thinking about character histories--what emotion do they view the prism of their history through? Joy? Despair? Appreciation? Disdain? A shrug?
To me, saying, for example, that a protagonist "had a hard childhood where their father disappeared and their mother died" is necessary but not quite sufficient. How do they view that past? Do they resent their father's disappearance? Are they secretly happy because he was never present? Do they mourn their mother's loss, or do they feel indifferent? And, perhaps just as important a question--how does the viewing of one's history change over time?
Although my opening paragraph may suggest I have a lot of bones to pick with my Catholic upbringing, as I've gotten older, I've become more nuanced. One might argue my love of mythology and Gods didn't actually start with Final Fantasy VI, but with my fascination with the church and its dogma. I definitely won't argue the idea that my most influential writing teachers came from the Catholic high school I attended. Similarly, with my characters, I always try to make their pasts an evolving story. A character who came to resent their childhood hardships may, by the end of the series, come to understand them as necessary or even a silver lining. A character who started out naive, blindly accepting the lessons given to them, learns to question them--but not necessarily discard them immediately.
The strongest example I can give of this honestly isn't even published yet. In "The Sword of Fire," and the series at large, the backstory of one of the protagonists, Noel Chryss, is an ever-evolving change. At the start, he's almost fearful of his past for what has happened in his life, and his goal is to keep his world as small as possible. By the end of the first book... I'll just leave it at things change, but not necessarily in the obvious "he started small and now thinks big, and he was once afraid but now is courageous." Simplified, maybe, but in a more nuanced perspective, not quite.
Among my published works (as of the time of this writing), this is honestly something I don't think I've played with enough. However, there is a concept I experimented with very strongly in "War of the Magi." What is that concept? Well...
My World-Building History
When I was younger, as I mentioned before, I took the permanence of history for granted. As I got older, I came to appreciate that a lot of it came down to perspective, personal beliefs, and even personal agenda. But as I've gotten even older, it's wild to see the changing history of eras that I myself have lived through.
We all know about having rose-tinted glasses for the past, but something that I've noticed is that the people whose glasses are tinted with the strongest hues are actually the ones who didn't even live during a certain era. Think about the millennials who yearn for the "simpler" times of the mid-20th century, or those who say they were born in the wrong era. Amongst the students I help with college admissions, there's a certain level of jealousy for those of us who grew up before social media and came of age in social media's nascent stages.
From my perspective, it's easy to forget the anxiety of, among other things: terrorism... violent video games... demonic cults... kidnapping sprees... distrust for putting financial information on "the internet"... violent Saturday morning cartoons... on and on. We compare the past we survived with the present we endure and think that it was just so much easier back then, but in my opinion, that's not the case. The world is never as simple as once viewed it; having survived it, though, we spin a web of history that tells us the truth and allows us to plan for the future.
"War of the Magi" is seven books long, but it's really two series in one, the first a trilogy, the second a quadrilogy taking place four hundred years later. As the reader, having gone through the entire trilogy at the start, you know the events of that time period and the truth of what happened. But in real life, we sometimes forget the truth of what happened four years ago; imagine trying to know the truth of four centuries before.
Well, in the quadrilogy of books 4-7, that's exactly what happened. The truth of those events four hundred years before has gotten twisted into something superficially glorious, more deeply unsettling. I don't want to say too much lest you are reading the series, but one character's entire saga gets twisted from a hard but meaningful hero's journey into something "glorious" that was very much not. It's a study of what happens when a kingdom leverages events for their own benefit, even with good intentions, and the consequences of what happens.
My work with this in "The Sword of Fire" and its series is even more explicit in regards to this. There are four nations, the prologue starts with an event one thousand years in the past, and all four nations differ in how they view the fallout of that event. What that means for each nation and each character gets explored over the course of five novels (and however many novellas I choose to write).
A Holistic History
It's obvious to me now, seeing it with events I lived myself and interpretations of historical events like the American Revolution and Civil War, how history is malleable. It's only as I've thought through things, however, that I've come to realize these aren't just facts that define our pasts; they guide our actions, and the more we fall for the trap of "believing they knew truth" the more chained we are to our histories. I can't say I'm smart enough to know what this means for me personally.
But I can say it's an idea I've loved exploring in my fantasy, and I hope to continue exploring it at least in my current work-in-progress, if not in all my work.