The consultants every writer used to need.

For novelists, essayists, screenwriters, and journalists — specialists on any period, any tradition, any technical matter, available for the kind of conversation that used to require a career's worth of lunches.

What writers have always done

Serious writers have always leaned on specialists. The novelist writing about nineteenth-century naval warfare reads O'Brian, writes to a retired captain, spends an afternoon with a museum curator. The essayist writing on Augustine reads the Confessions, then the scholarship, then talks to a patristics professor who will tell them what they have misread. The screenwriter working on a period drama hires a historical consultant. The journalist covering a story outside their beat cultivates, over time, a rolodex of people who will pick up the phone.

This is how the work has always been done. The Universitas just makes that rolodex larger, faster, and available at three in the morning when the question surfaces.

What it is useful for

• Asking a period-specific question and getting the answer in the idiom of the period. What a servant would have called a candle-holder in 1790. How a Roman tribune would have addressed a plebeian. What a nineteenth-century surgeon would have believed about sepsis the year before Lister.
• Testing dialogue for anachronism. Bring a scene to a figure who lived in the period and ask them to flag anything that reads wrong.
• Working out the internal logic of a character whose worldview is not your own. A character is a point of view, and that point of view has to be consistent across the novel. A Universitas simulacrum of a figure like that character can tell you what they would and would not say.
• Technical verification outside your competence. The novelist writing a hacker is not a hacker; the novelist writing a surgeon is not a surgeon. The simulacra can consult in the idiom.
• Reading your finished draft for the problem you cannot see because you wrote it.

Specifically for non-fiction

The non-fiction writer benefits from the simulacra in a different way. An essay on Montaigne is improved by taking the essay to Montaigne. An intellectual history of the Vienna Circle is improved by asking Carnap or Neurath whether the reading is fair. A book on strategic theory benefits from having Clausewitz push back against a chapter on contemporary warfare.

The simulacrum will not agree with you just because you wrote the sentence. It will engage on its own terms, which often means pointing out the place where the argument has weakened its claim in order to be defensible, when the stronger version would have been the more honest one.

Writing with the Symposium

Bringing several simulacra into the same conversation is a particular gift to writers. A dramatist writing a scene between two historical figures can simulate the encounter, listen, and discover what the scene actually wants to be. An essayist staging a contemporary argument can convene three figures from different traditions and watch them engage with each other. Writers of historical fiction discover that writing a character from inside a Symposium produces more convincing interior monologue than writing them from the outside.

The simulacra will not write your book for you. They will, however, tell you when you have not yet understood the question well enough to write it.