Have you ever wondered why we study history? It’s just stuff that people did a long time ago. Isn’t that kind of boring? Why can’t we learn about what’s going on now? After all, that’s where we all are. We all know that we study history in order to not repeat the mistakes made by our ancestors, but have you ever thought that perhaps we also look to the past for ideas?
Why would we look to the past for ideas? Aren’t we far more advanced and civilized than the people of the past? Why would we look to the Greeks for ideas? Those people ran around naked during the Olympics! What could we learn from the Romans? They cheered as gladiators slaughtered dozens of lions! Have you ever heard of politics or maybe concrete? We get much of our political ideals from a Greek man named Aristotle, and we got concrete from the Romans. Without both of those, the world would obviously be much different.
I look to the past all of the time for ideas, and I would suggest that you do the same if you ever run low on ideas. What if you don’t have time to read history books or texts written by the great philosophers of old such as Seneca, Plato, Confucius, Socrates, and Thales? I don’t have time either, but I can still look to the past for ideas using a tool that I believe to be invaluable.
Go to Wikipedia and type in October 3. You will instantly have at least a hundred different historical events from which you can procure ideas. The best part is that you don’t need to read pages upon pages of boringness. I do this often to come up with ideas as well as to create writing prompts for my Twitter followers.
The nice thing about these summaries is that you can use them without writing historical fiction. Perhaps you take a look at the First Battle of Philippi in which Marc Antony and Octavian, the future Roman Emperor Augustus fight a decisive battle against Julius Caesar’s assassins in 42 BC. There a lot of ideas that you could come up with based off of this short summary. Perhaps you write a story about a son following his father’s murderers around the world until he can catch up with them and kill them. Perhaps you write a story about two leaders of a failed revolution running away from those against whom they had rebelled. There are obviously many more things you could do with simply this summary, let alone the hundreds you can find just researching the historical events that took place on one particular date.
As you search for ideas, I would encourage you to look at the past for ideas. This is one of the easiest ways to come up with new ideas. As I always say, all you need do is pick some particular fact and obsess over it. A lot of historical events don’t seem as though they have any significance with regards to our everyday lives, but if you think through them, you will find that they do in fact. People care about writing that has some significance to them. History is significant. Base your writing off of it.