One gains a double benefit in writing about the past, conjuring up how things might have been, and at the same time acquiring a different perspective on the present.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
They say every writer really just writes about one thing over and over. I guess my one thing is how the past impacts the present.
I've always been fascinated by how the past impacts the present. For the first half of my career as a novelist, I wrote psychological suspense mysteries. I wanted to be a therapist but was told that while I was a fine diagnostician, I would be a terrible therapist because I wanted to solve everyone's problems.
I write about modern people who share a deep sense of connection to the mysteries of the past. I find that I understand myself and my world better when I'm able to peer into history as a mirror.
Learning from the past helps to ensure that mistakes are not repeated.
The illusion is that most of my work is simply about past events: a point in history and nothing else.
Writing about the future and the past is less a way of dramatizing change than of showing, by way of contrast, what abides.
The advantage of writing from experience is that it often provides you with details that you would never think of yourself, no matter how rich your imagination. And specificity in description is something every writer should strive for.
Historians tell the story of the past, novelists the story of the present.
In the sense that writing is to retrieve the past and stop the passing of time, all writing is about loss. It's not nostalgia in the sense of yearning to bring back the past, but recognition of the erosion of things as you live.
I'm not much for sitting around and thinking about the past or talking about the past. What does that accomplish? If I can give young people something to think about, like the future, that's a better use of my time.