History That Never Was

So this prompt page wound up with me writing a lot of tiny notes, and it’s kind of a mess, honestly. Instead of trying to transcribe it, I’ll summarize what I’ve got.

First off, I identified the flags as papel picado, because I hadn’t known their actual name before. They’re connected to the Day of the Dead in modern times, but they started as an Aztec tradition. This sent me down a rabbit hole related to Aztec paper, called amate, from before the Spanish conquest of the Americas.

From there, my notes split in two directions. On the left-hand side of the page, I dug into mulberry and fig trees/leaves, as these were the trees from which the Aztecs made amate, out of the bark. But because of the leaves at the bottom of the page, I dug into the leaves of those trees, as I’ve occasionally seen very brittle leaves where some portions of the leaf itself has been removed, similar to papel picado. I noted that both mulberry and fig trees have a five-lobed version of their leaves, which could look a bit like a hand and also wrote down some of the medicinal purposes the leaves can be used for.

On the right-hand side of the page, I scribbled a bit on the use of amate for record keeping and ritual purposes, how the Spanish banned the use of this paper and destroyed many Aztec records by claiming that this paper was used for magical purposes., and a little bit about how amate was used for ritual purposes.

My final note on the page was “celebratory remembrance of the brave dead.” This was an idea for a possible story that I might write using this research, because I’ve already written a couple of stories involving the Spanish conquest of South America, and I wanted to take a potential story in a different direction.

However, after I wrote all this up, I remembered that I started a story quite some time ago that involves a young Latina superhero, Halloween, and the Day of the Dead. So I think instead of writing a new story from this prompt page, I might use a little bit of the research I did to help me add some details to the Day of the Dead portion of that story instead!

I’d love to hear what you’ve used this page for, or if my notes here sparked any new ideas for you!

Tags: fun for friday, research, the big pink book, writing process, writing prompts

This entry was posted by dawn.vogel on Friday, June 19th, 2026 at 6:00 am and is filed under For Fun. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.