Let the world be your crutch

Searching for historical events has never been easier, and it figures to become even smoother as technology feeds off its own successes and failures.

Wikipedia has become America's go-to resource, which is fine. It's typically well-grounded and organized, and it's in a writing style we understand. That's not nothing, as we are inclined to say in this incarnation of the language.

But the fun part is seeing how the world pursued the facts before Wikipedia and Google, or Bing, or Jeeves.

If you're building a story off historical fact, there's nothing cheesier than reciting Wikipedia, using only that as your resource and telling the world you just built it up based on hours of back-breaking, heart-wrenching, finger-throbbing research.

Modern history is condensed, and it's often modified now from the original. That's called something many people find insulting. I claim it's getting it right. It's not linear and it's often complex, slow to react and laced with irrelevant trivia, all of which is quite intriguing.

Wikipedia sometimes leaves out the juicy bits because the author either didn't think the juicy bits were as juicy as we thought they were or, worse, didn't know the juicy bits existed. In a phrase, if all you know about anything is what you read in Wikipedia, anybody who reads Wikipedia knows that's all you know about it. Don't be that person.

(It's fine to use Wikipedia just to get a date or place, if your only reason for using it is for reference. Nobody much cares about that.)

Anyone can learn about the Rosenbergs with a Google search.

Which is fine. It anchors you to the ground. Even the book you read about them will be well-known to anybody who's interested in the topic. If your story is about Julius and Ethel, the experts already have this history down -- pat.

But that should not preclude you from doing a story about the time the Rosenbergs existed, and the intrigue and drama surrounding this infamous 20th century Red Scare tale. Hundreds of movies and books cover the Cold War and any or all of them still resonate. Patriotism paid big royalties in those days. Joe McCarthy was a cruel man.

You can build a great book around real events without having to quantify all of it. You just need to be inspired. You need to be accurate with facts and believable in the parts that could have been facts. If it couldn't have happened, that will stick out like a sore toe.

What if your tale is about a man who knew the Rosenbergs' milkman? What if no such person existed? What if he did?

One of the most interesting stories of all time is The Great Gatsby, which is about the man who knew the man.

Play the game, but don't think the 50 push-ups you get from Wikipedia will get you in shape. Do the road work.