History and Writers

Occasionally I am asked questions relating to what people 'should' study at college, especially if they want to be a writer. (Sometimes it comes in the form of 'do I have to study English?')

Well. I have discussed English degrees here previously, and the importance of studying what you love. But now I want to talk about… history.

Because if I had to pick one subject that I think helps or suits writers, it's that. And no one seems to ever talk about it.

I did not anticipate studying history at college, but then because of the way the joint honors degree programme was structured at Trinity, and because I wanted to do English without having to do Old English, I ended up in history. It seemed like a subject I could do with English that wouldn't destroy my soul.

Now, I suspect this is the case for most third-level subjects that also appear on second-level curricula, but people have a terrible tendency of thinking they know what you do in history. They seem to be under the impression it's about memorising dates. About learning off what happened.

Oh, the history student will say, shaking their head, if only we could be sure about what had happened!

Or if people could agree about what had happened. Or why it had happened. Or the significance of it happening. Or about the impact of it happening on people at the time.

So much of history is about people. Every university and department and lecturer will have their own preferences in terms of what they focus on, of course – do we care about 'the ordinary people' or 'the women' or do we even have the available sources to say much about them? Do we focus on what the parliamentary records say, what the newspapers reported, what someone scribbled in their diary, what a novel of the time implies? Do we focus on the economy or the architecture, on education, music, medicine, shopping? Or do we look at military tactics and who won which battle? It's possible to avoid people, but it gets less likely the more you look at a particular topic.

History invites us to empathise with the people of the past. To understand them. It asks: how did they see the world? It can be tempting sometimes to see the people of the past as simpletons – rather than people who had a different conceptualisation of things we may take for granted. History asks us to consider how a particular culture shapes people and shapes how they view things – how we view things. Our idea of what's 'normal' is very much a culturally specific thing rather an ahistorical unchanging 'truth'. History reminds us of that.*

An ability to empathise, to understand, and to speculate where necessary… a writer needs these skills, and studying history invites you to exercise and develop them.

Also… history is fun.

(any excuse…)

*As you may notice, I'm not advocating the study of history as a 'if we don't study the past how can we learn from it?' thing. I think it is patently obvious that what we learn from the past is that we don't learn from the past…