An Interesting Question

I believe one of the defining traits of a writer is an undying interest in the personal affairs of others. It’s not quite like being a gossip, which involves discussing other people indirectly, it’s more like being nosy to a person’s face. Writers want to know not only what you did but why you did it.

This isn’t the sole trait of a writer, of course; and there are plenty of people kindly and/or intensely interested in personal stories who aren’t writers. But I think that every “character-driven” story ever written had an author who was trying to figure out how a certain type of person would behave if confronted by a certain problem.

I think writers are interested in history for that reason. I remember being convinced that King Richard III of England was not a monster who murdered his brothers, his wife and his nephews because what was known of his personal life and the opinions of people who knew him well showed a person who could not possibly be that wicked. It was a murder mystery that started me researching Richard III – and thereby garnered an interest in medieval England. The book was Josephine Tey’s Daughter of Time. It also started a peculiar and private hobby of wishing for a time machine so I could go back and ask a question of a historical figure.

If you could wander back in time to just one place and ask just one question of someone, where would you go, and what would you ask?