How School is Influencing My Writing

10-28-10

Other than making my fiction writing nearly non-existent, I have been doing lots of thinking. Granted, thinking does not equal writing, but good ideas come from everywhere. (I do get some writing time squeezed in, but then other stuff (like this blog) gets squeezed out.)

I am currently in History of England, and we are currently in the time period of the Stuarts. We just started with James I--and it's also around the time period of the term paper I'm writing for the class. But we've traced ideas since before William the Conqueror, and you know who came before the Stuarts? The Tudors. Yep, those people--monarchs who knew how to put on a show and seemed to have an instinctive grasp on politics. Those Tudors were sharp.

What does that mean for my writing? Well, I have a lot of stories where I have kings or princes or monarchs or some type of leader other than a president and very often hereditary, and I have never truly thought about the nature of hereditary leadership. We learned in History of England that the power of people in feudalism stemmed from land and loyalty, and land came from inheritance and loyalty came from personality. So, if you had a sucky personality and had lots of land, you had power, but not as much as someone generally beloved by his subjects.

Take Richard I and John. Everyone knows the stories about the evil Prince John and Robin Hood and what not. But no one actually mentions that the reason that Prince (therefore, while Richard was still king) John had high taxes is because Richard had gone off on Crusade, gotten himself captured by fellow Christians, and the country was trying to raise enough money to redeem their king. (Who, non-coincidentally, also couldn't speak English and only spent six months in England of his ten year reign.) But Richard I was beloved because he knew how to wow people and crowds, how to make it look like he trusted people when he probably didn't. John didn't have that type of charisma--he distrusted people and they knew it. No wonder the barons made him sign the Magna Carta.

So, in my stories that deal with such types of monarchs (or leaders of any sort), I need to figure out how their personality will affect their leadership and the loyalty of the people around them. Are the people loyal because of the person? Or because of the ideals that person holds? Or because of the position that person is in? Where does the leader get his or her authority? From divinity? From the will of the people? From a written set of laws? From merit? Is a leader's power absolute, his or her word law, or does that power and law come from some other place and some other authority? Is there any authority apart from the leader?

James I equated questioning the king's right to do whatever he wanted to being a heretic; do I want my characters believing that or something else?

These are weighty matters that never occurred to me before I took this class, and I think knowing them and thinking through them might just make my writing better.