Life & Wisdom Quote by Lynn Abbey

A self-declared passion for "the collection of historical trivia" is a small confession with big implications: it frames history not as grand narrative, but as a cabinet of curiosities. Lynn Abbey, writing from inside the professional machinery of storytelling, isn’t praising footnotes for their own sake. She’s describing a method. "Trivia" sounds disposable, the stuff that falls off the table when Serious People assemble Serious History. Abbey flips that hierarchy by treating the marginalia as fuel - the odd custom, the misremembered anecdote, the forgotten law. Those details are where worlds become legible.

The phrasing matters. "Collection" implies intention and craft: not merely knowing facts, but choosing, organizing, and hoarding them the way a novelist hoards sensory impressions. It also signals a particular pleasure in the scavenger hunt, the jolt of finding something wonderfully specific that punctures the smoothness of a period-piece cliché. For a fantasy and historical-fiction sensibility, trivia is the antidote to generic medievalism or cookie-cutter antiquity. One unexpected detail can make an invented kingdom feel older than the reader.

There’s subtext, too, about authority. Calling it "trivia" is disarming, a preemptive shrug that avoids academic gatekeeping while still asserting expertise. Abbey positions herself as a writer who earns authenticity sideways: not by lecturing, but by smuggling truth through texture. In an era of Wikipedia summaries and prestige-history simplifications, it’s a quiet argument for the power of the irrelevant fact to reveal what official narratives polish away.