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Entity explains why you should read historical fiction books.

There is nothing better than getting cozy with a cup of tea (milk, two sugars), a blanket (soft, knitted) and a book (fiction, historical). Whether you prefer the love stories of Susanna Kearsley or the bloody battles of Bernard Cornwell, there’s a historical fiction book for everybody.

To learn more about the genre, ENTITY spoke to “The Night Journal” and “Monday Monday” author Elizabeth Crook.

“I love every part of [writing historical fiction],” she tells us. “First of all there’s the fun of happening onto the place and time that you feel, as a writer, you can live every day while you’re writing. It’s that AHA moment when you stumble into the underground Kiva, or onto the battlefield, or just into the room where the air shifts and suddenly you know this is where the next story you’re going to write happened.”

Here’s why everyone should read historical fiction.

READ MORE: Humanizing History: Interview with Historical Fiction Author, Susanna Kearsley

1 Travel through time.

“Reading good historical fiction, to me, is like time traveling,” says Crook. “I can disappear into a wormhole and find myself in another world where I get to walk around and meet people who are similar to me in all the basic emotional ways but who have a different set of values or a different way of thinking based on their circumstances.”

As you read, the real world disappears as the story takes over. You aren’t sitting on your coach anymore – you are a 19th century pioneer woman or the daughter of an ancient king. As reality blurs, you begin to embrace each moment and each emotion as if you were actually there.

2 Understand human nature

When you read books set in different time periods, you bring history to life in a unique way. You are able to see firsthand how people reacted to events so important that they’re mentioned in every history textbook.

But when we read fiction from the past, we make more than just historical connections, we make emotional connections. Crook says that writing forces her to realize that “people in the past are so like us.” The process of traveling through time “connects [her] to people from other times and makes [her] more understanding, more reasonable and hopefully more empathetic with people in [her] own time.”

READ MORE: 4 Reasons the Library is Your Best Friend

3 Interpret our past through storytelling

At the heart of historical fiction is empathy and emotion. When we read historical fiction, we allow ourselves to search for meaning and to uncover patterns in history. We actively learn about how hundreds of different civilizations were born, prospered and then collapsed.

“Personally, I never write for didactic reasons but prefer to let the story unfold as it naturally and realistically would, given the period of history and who the characters are within that period,” Crook says. “Writing good historical fiction doesn’t depend just on being able to write well, or to research thoroughly, or even on being able to spin a good story. It requires knowing human nature and understanding how characters will interact with one another.

“If a writer doesn’t have that ability, then the characters won’t be authentic or believable. And if the characters aren’t believable, then the reader won’t care about them. And, of course, if the reader doesn’t care about the characters, then she or he won’t care what happens to them—and there goes your story. The reading experience, for me, always comes down to whether or not I care.”

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4 Learn from our mistakes

If there’s one thing we’ve learned from history, it’s that it repeats. What we learn from reading historical fiction, we can apply to our own lives and situations that may come up in the future. 

“So often we learn only the facts of history: what happened and when. We aren’t fully educated as to why,” Crook explains. “By stripping events of emotion – especially of pathos and humor and of the motives and driving forces behind what happened – we deprive history of what’s memorable and useful. We flatten it. Good historical fiction restores the dimensions.” And with new dimension comes new learning, a chance to learn from our ancestors and make better decisions in our lives.

READ MORE: Jane Austen, Agatha Christie and Other Favorite Female Authors

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