Guest post written by Heavenbreaker author Sara Wolf
Sara Wolf lives in Portland, Oregon, where the sun can’t get her anymore. When she isn’t pouring her allotted life force into writing, she’s reading, accidentally burning houses down whilst baking, or making faces at her highly appreciative cat. She is the author of the NYT bestselling Lovely Vicious series and the Bring Me Their Hearts series. Follow along with her on Instagram.
In the prehistoric days before the internet, encyclopedias were A Thing.
As a child you never go seeking encyclopedias – they sort of just fall into your lap. In my case, the more serious aunts who didn’t know any better about my niche interests in catching bugs or watching anime wrapped encyclopedias up and presented them to me on Christmas. ‘It’s the thought that counts’, Mom said, and I huffed and returned to my far more interesting video games.
But one day the batteries ran out in the video game, and so I picked up that big, boring encyclopedia.
What followed was ten years of an increasingly slippery slope into the world of history – Greek myth, European humorism, Egyptian mummification processes, Silk Road anecdotes…I ravenously devoured this new world of interesting facts and figures. As an added bonus, I could tell these facts swimming around the soup of my adolescent head to adults and reap the rewards of glowing pride when they smiled and said “Oh really? I didn’t know that.” It was a modicum of control in a childhood world that was rapidly spiraling out of my hands and into a divorce, but it was such a decade of impactful growth that its echoes reverberate in how I learn today; through Wikipedia.
I read Wikipedia. For fun, mostly, until it comes time to write and research a novel, and then it becomes business.
Reading Wikipedia itself doesn’t teach you anything concrete, really, except for the fact that perhaps you don’t know anything at all. When researching for books you can’t rely on Wikipedia to tell you exactly how or why, but you can get a broad sense of things, and sometimes all you need as a writer is a shallow pool of a beginning. Writers are used to making mountains out of molehills, entire fanfictions out of a single glance, and Wikipedia is an endless buffet of shallow pools to make deeper with imagination. All that’s required is you prop up the sides with things that feel real.
My newest soft sci-fi book HEAVENBREAKER was actually born out of a single line I read on Wikipedia; ‘In jousting, the knights experience close to 3.25 times their body weight in G-forces when the lance collides with their armor’. I thought it was strange to see the word G-force – something used primarily in astronaut training and the like – in conjunction with such an old-world sport as jousting. The idea of combining old with new really struck me, and thus my idea for HEAVENBREAKER was born; giant robots jousting in space. Perfect.
I knew fragments of medieval history, and I admit even to this day I’m no scholar, but the internet is a treasure trove of people who know more than you about any one subject, and I followed all sorts of scholarly accounts in order to absorb some of their knowledge. Most of my own knowledge came from reading historical fiction like The Royal Diaries series, which delved into the lives of prominent royal girls throughout history such as Elizabeth I and Eleanor of Aquitaine, and various history textbooks. History isn’t just written word, though – it lives on in things like food and accounts of every day life. In medieval Europe, writing was reserved primarily for royalty and monks, so the amount of firsthand accounts of peasant life is dismal. We have to infer a lot, and I looked to things like food and clothing and art to fill in those menial, everyday life gaps. There are a stunning amount of historical recreators on YouTube, and pouring through dozens of them led me to one conclusion; humans are humans no matter what the time period. We value ease and comfort and socialization, and nothing beats a hot meal and clean clothes.
The internet truly helped me ground a book like HEAVENBREAKER in tangible terms; even though the book takes place in the far future of 3442, humans remain human. All of my book research about physics and space vacuums and AI and the possibility of black holes pales in comparison to the fundamental reality of being alive. The intricacies of an encyclopedia or a cut-and-dry article cannot contain the fact that we are, always, human.
No matter the leaps in our technology, in a hundred years we will still value what resonates with our souls; seeing each other’s faces and sharing a meal. That will never change.
And at the end of the day, when all the research has faded, that is how you write.
By being human.
