October Novel Prep Challenge

Thanksgiving must be very... intellectual in your family.

As a kid, history was my least favourite subject. I took 5 AP exams in high school, and I got one of each score: 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5. The subjects were: chemistry, calculus, English, US government, and US history. Guess which one was the 1? I'll give you a clue: the 2 was US government.

And then a strange thing happened. They invented the Internet, and then Wikipedia. And then Wikipedia got reliable. And all of a sudden, I found myself able to spend hours reading about history. Is that weird?

Maybe I just had boring teachers.

I lived in Germany in high school, where I was utterly surrounded by reminders of history. In Frankfurt, modern skyscrapers and ancient (by American standards) buildings stood side-by-side, right downtown. Germans are embarrassed by their history of holocaust, much like Americans are embarrassed by their history of slavery. Those things didn't interest me back then. Maybe appreciation of history comes with maturity, or life experience?

My 82-year-old mother in law lives with my husband and me. She was born in 1938, the year before colour films hit the theaters (In 1939, gone with the wind and the wizard of oz battled it out at the Oscars. Why didn't my US history teacher cover things like that??) And sometimes it amazes me to think that when she was a child, she knew grownups who remembered life before cars and telephones, when much of the US would have still been classified as the old west. And those people had thoughts and dreams and relationships and emotions and beliefs and politics just like we do.

I binged Cheers last year and couldn't believe how un-PC it is to today's standards, especially with respect to gender equality. That was the 80s. And I think, what was it like to be a woman in ancient Rome?? People in history are both relatable and entirely not relatable, you know? And today, I find that fascinating, and definitely inspiring as a writer.

Just don't make me memorise the dates of any major battles.

Cheers,
Michelle