We'd love to do Pirates for the 21st century. People have also asked about Colonization, and a few others.
If what you know and what you love are the same thing, that's great. But if not, write what you love. I love history, secrets, conspiracies, action, adventure, international settings.
'Tragedy' and 'Loud City Song' are both inspired by stories from the past.
I'm just such a Luddite, and I want to write books about Luddites.
I'm something of a history buff. It's deliberate that a lot of my films have been period pieces.
I don't think that my work is actually effectively dealing with history. I think of my work as subsumed by history or consumed by history.
The challenge to writers today, I think, is not to disown any part of our heritage. Whatever our theme in writing, it is old and tried. Whatever our place, it has been visited by the stranger, it will never be new again. It is only the vision that can be new; but that is enough.
There is a sort of myth of History that philosophers have.... History for philosophers is some sort of great, vast continuity in which the freedom of individuals and economic or social determinations come and get entangled. When someone lays a finger on one of those great themes--continuity, the effective exercise of human liberty, how individual liberty is articulated with social determinations--when someone touches one of these three myths, these good people start crying out that History is being raped or murdered.
Cultural concepts are one of the most fascinating things about historical fiction.
I've always been drawn to writing historical characters. The best stories are the ones you find in history.
There are a lot of Chinese comics, but the Chinese comics tend to be more historical and conservative. Japanese culture, just the comics are amazing. They're like films: very few words; they move so much in these books with hundreds of pages.
The reason why you do history, and particularly why you do war, is that you want to make sure that in the next war, some lessons were learned. There's a saying: "History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme." Or Ecclesiastes: "What has been will be again. What has been done will be done again." Human nature always superimposes itself - its strength and its frailty over the rush of chaos of ongoing events - and we can perceive patterns and themes and motifs.
It may be that universal history is the history of the different intonations given a handful of metaphors.
If you read any of my books, they tend to have a strong historical perspective.
Ever since my youth it has disturbed me that of the literary works that survived their own epoch, so many dealt with historical rather than contemporary subjects.
When I began to act, I was about 6 years old. Everything you learned, every period of history you studied, you did a play about it.
I like the stories with the historical themes.
I write novels, mostly historical ones, and I try hard to keep them accurate as to historical facts, milieu and flavor.
