Bringing Stories to Life—Inspired by David McCullough
When I was fifteen years old, I picked up a book titled Mornings on Horseback because it was physically in my house and Mother Nerd recommended it. It was a work of nonfiction about Theodore Roosevelt and had been written by a historian my mother liked. The subject matter—the 26th president of the United States—was interesting enough, but the author and how he wrote captured my attention more. Thus began my own appreciation for David McCullough and his wordsmithing.
You may have heard of Mr. McCullough before, but, if you haven’t, you should know that he has an excellent bibliography on historical topics ranging from more presidential biographies to the building of the Brooklyn Bridge to the natural disaster that was the Johnstown Flood to (my personal favorite) the lives and successes of the Wright brothers. He was educated at Yale and, in addition to being a writer, provided narration on multiple documentaries and hosted a series on PBS. When he passed away in 2022, I’m sure Mother Nerd and I weren’t the only ones saddened to know that we’d get no more historical storytelling from him.
Then—summer of 2025. I was on Goodreads and some delightful news: one, last piece of McCullough’s would be published in September. A posthumous collection of essays compiled by his daughter and his assistant.
I immediately texted Mother Nerd to put it on her radar, too, and she got us a copy. It was only last month I was able to read it—History Matters is the title—and what a treat it was.
You may not be a fellow history-lover, so you may be checking out now. You may think McCullough’s books aren’t for you. Here’s the thing that’s true about both history and the stories McCullough put together, though: they’re all about people. They’re for people. People back then, ripple effects felt by us now, and connections tying generations together through time. History texts can be bogged down by facts relayed in a dull, dry manner, but not every historian writes that way. Don’t be so quick to dismiss this branch of nonfiction “for history is not dead, but living; history is not past, but unfolding. And as McCullough taught us, nothing matters more” (XV).
More than being a history nerd, as a writer, I also find value in the art of storytelling McCullough dedicated his life to. History Matters, a relatively small book covering a wide variety of topics, touched on his writing life, the structure he created to consistently produce pages, and the wisdom gleaned from a lifetime crafting with words. I look to that wisdom as any young student to a trusted mentor would.
McCullough has left behind a great many things to teach us about writing, so let me share some of it with you now.
One of the big lessons McCullough seems to have wanted to pass along is to never cease being curious. To know why and how something took place. To know who was involved and what they were like. Storytellers, of fiction and nonfiction alike, should be abounding in questions. If you’re not making inquiries of your characters or their community or the conflict they’re up against, that strikes me as a problem. Questions demand answers, which you research and write your way to. To fail to be and stay curious typically means your story’s lost a little life, a little of the heartbeat it started out with. There may be times when you have to regenerate that life, and, in those moments, I hope you make the effort and do it. I hope you find a way to bring energy back to your writing because “our curiosity is what separates us from the cabbages. And curiosity, happily, is accelerating like gravity” (147).
You start asking a question, and it leads to another. And then another and another until you’ve uncovered something interesting and thought-provoking and inspiring. Curiosity is fuel for your brain, and it’s vital to keep your mind awake to what’s around you and informing your writing.
Cultivating a curious, captivating mind is such a necessary part of the creative process—a forever on-going part—because strengthening mental muscles is a must for every writer. This is because “every day, writing a book is a series of decisions—what to leave out, how to simplify, how to clarify, how to be clear. That’s hard. That’s what writing is—it’s thinking. And to write well is to think clearly” (160). Being a writer is constantly asking yourself, “How do I best articulate all that needs to be conveyed in this scene, this chapter, so a reader will understand the meaning here?”
Writers, we’re both trying to make sense of the ideas in our minds in a way that makes sense to others, too, through the words we wrangle out of the void and onto paper. McCullough’s correct: that’s a difficult thing.
He’s also correct in saying the difficulty in writing is “what makes it so captivating. Writing is a chance to enlarge life” (145).
In McCullough’s career, he was always looking to enlarge life as it’d, historically, played out. I love that, in an address he gave at the National Preservation Conference in 1991, he said, “The marvelous thing about the past is whenever you reach down into it, all you find is life” (12).
That’s what I believe is his greatest lesson on storytelling for any and all writers. The tale you’re telling should be alive, whether that’s because you dug into some research on how life in the 1800s was or because you took a look around, observed, and transcribed your observations onto the page. When he wrote history, he was fully aware that “the moment has gone, the characters are dead, but you can bring them back, re-create their ever-changing lives in such a way that the story does not sound monotonous, with an unrelieved tempo. Life does not come at us that way—why should history” (37)?
How you soak up life—the things you read, the people you meet and/or learn about, the curiosity you generate—are invaluable to your writing, and McCullough would have us know it. “That’s the great thing,” he said, “about a writer’s life: nothing is useless, everything bears on the work” (42).
And work it certainly is, he makes a point to acknowledge, though he also points out that writing is happiness—since “happiness—true happiness—is not found in vacations or the like. It’s to be found in the love of learning and doing what you really want to get up and get to each day” (145). Typically, for us writers, writing is what we’d rather be doing, and things like work, responsibilities, exhaustion get in the way.
Still, we can take McCullough’s encouragement to learn, pursue, and do. There is joy to be found in the toil of research or building your writing skills or feeling like you’ve unlocked the life of your story. McCullough would tell us to keep working—and to see that, in the interplay of the past and present, there are endless tales to be telling.
Work Cited: McCullough, David G., et al. History Matters. Simon & Schuster, 2025.