How These Stories Are Made
Every story on this site begins with historical research and ends with original fiction. This page explains what happens in between.
Step 1: Find the Foundation
The starting point is always a real person, event, or period. Not a famous one, necessarily — often the most interesting material lives just off the edge of what most people know. Rennell mapping Bengal. A translator at a peace conference whose name was omitted from the treaty. The crew of a ship that returned without its captain and filed a report that contradicts itself three times.
The foundation has to have two qualities: enough documented detail to make it real, and enough silence in the record to make fiction possible.
Step 2: Research the Silence
Primary sources are read before secondary ones. What did the people involved actually write? What did they leave out? Where does the official account strain against itself?
The silences are usually the story. A survey notebook that is scrupulously precise about geography and says nothing about the men who died making it. A peace treaty that records every concession and nothing about the room where it was negotiated.
Step 3: Find the Fiction
Once the foundation is understood well enough, the story becomes almost inevitable. Not what happened — what it felt like. What the person who kept the survey notebook was thinking when they wrote in a different hand at the bottom of a page. What was said in the room the treaty doesn't mention.
The fiction is not a reconstruction. It is a response — the story that the historical record provokes but cannot tell.
A Note on AI Assistance
These stories are written with AI assistance. The research, the framing, the decisions about what matters and what doesn't — those are human. The prose is collaborative: shaped, revised, and edited until it says what it means to say.
This is disclosed because it's the honest thing to do, and because the process is itself interesting. The question of where research ends and imagination begins is old. The question of where human writing ends and machine writing begins is new. These stories live somewhere in that second question, trying to find out what it means.