This week: Something Old, Something New Edited by: Kit  
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Dinosaurs, knights, castles... can you blend them with the fresh and new? It's not always easy to come up with something unique, especially when you're tapping into history.
This week's Action/Adventure Newsletter, then, is all about the old and the new. And dinosaurs.
Kit |
When people ask me for my favourite movie, I always tell them it’s Jurassic Park. That tends to raise some eyebrows. There are some people who seem convinced that one’s tastes must impress, and Jurassic Park is not exactly highbrow. I watch movies to be entertained, however, and Jurassic Park is excellent fun. I can still remember the first time I watched it in the cinema. The sense of awe and wonder I experienced along with the characters, the first time they saw dinosaurs. The way that the floor seemed to shake when the T-Rex approached. It’s got action, and comedy, and it definitely entertained me. I’ve watched it multiple times now and it never fails to make me smile.
I’m less fond of the sequels. Jurassic World was okay, but didn’t have the excitement and wonder of Jurassic Park. I would love for there to be a new dinosaur movie that’s as enjoyable to me as Jurassic Park. One that doesn’t involve the military, or shadowy organisations, or mind control… I’m not into all that stuff. But blending the old and the new is difficult, I know. What can you do with dinosaurs that hasn’t been done yet?
A time-traveling vampire gets stuck and has to survive in a world where dinosaurs roam? No, probably not. I do love stories set fully or partially in the past, though. I’ve wondered what it would be like if I could travel back to the time of knights and castles… it is fun to imagine, but the reality is that I wouldn’t survive for long. I’d probably catch some horrible disease, or spread it to others and get burned at the stake for that. I’d have no connections, no skills that would make sense for that day and age. I wouldn’t even be able to impress them by ‘inventing’ something cool because I wouldn’t know how to build an engine from scratch, say, or how to produce modern medicine. Even if I had my phone with me it would run out of battery pretty quickly and I wouldn’t be able to charge it. I could tell them about washing your hands before performing surgery, but who’d believe the existence of bacteria they’d be unable to see? They wouldn’t want anything to do with me. Maybe I’d have some better luck in more recent centuries, but feminism wasn’t a thing yet and without connections I may end up having to beg on the streets.
It’s fun to think of the conversations I could have had with Napoleon – I would love to discover what truly drove him, and his thoughts on politics, philosophy… all manner of things, but he wouldn’t have wanted to discuss those with a woman – by the accounts I have read, anyway, he wouldn’t have taken someone like me all that serious. When I think of adventure, and daydream myself into an interesting scenario, I’d love to be the heroine – to perform brave deeds, to make a difference – but the reality is that my role would be much more likely to be inconsequential, and brief. I’m more likely to be the person who runs to the toilet in Jurassic Park than one who manages to cross and survive a park full of dangerous dinosaurs.
So when writing a story that draws from the old and the new, I have to create characters that are very much not-me, and place them in scenarios that do, perhaps, not entirely accurately reflect times gone by. That doesn’t necessarily pose an obstacle to an entertaining story. The dinosaurs in Jurassic Park do not look like our closest estimation of what dinosaurs actually may have looked like. Fewer feathers, for one. That doesn’t make them any less awe-inspiring.
Of course, when you play with history it’s important to let your readers know that that’s what you’re doing. Or you can set your story in a fantasy world, or alternate reality. What would European history have looked like without Napoleon? What if there were, indeed, time-traveling vampires?
How do you blend the old and the new? If, of course, you do? George R. R. Martin wrote medieval-style fantasy novels with some awesome heroines and female villains. Wizarding culture in J.K. Rowling’s novels is quite outdated compared to the more modern muggle world – no cinema, for example, nor computers, even though by the end of the novels it’s 1997, when many people were on the Internet. You don’t have to go back to the dinosaurs, then. Though if you do, and you have something quite unique, I’d be pleased to read it.
Happy writing!
Kit
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Wishing you a week filled with inspiration,
The Action/Adventure Newsletter Team
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Action/Adventure: December 03, 2025 Issue [#13482]
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