The Power of Primary Sources

There’s a neat guest post at Sarah Hoyt’s blog about the importance to budding writers of reading primary sources in other eras and places: it expands your horizons. She says,

An aspiring writer ought to read history. Lots of it. Even if — perhaps especially if — he intends to write SF or fantasy and build societies of his own. And the most important thing he should read is primary source, which is to say, stuff that was actually written at the time. Jane’s letter to her Aunt Hortensia. Esmeralda Doe’s diary. The cook book, the book about the Rules of Love, philosophical dialogs. Even fiction.

Not only does it give you neat details you can use in your own writing, it helps you to avoid making truly stupid mistakes based on your own preconceptions:

I once read a writer discussing world-building, who asserted that a medieval king would never have been called the Sun King because the term would have had no meaning in a geocentric universe. groan. Plenty of ancient and medieval kings used solar imagery. “Now is the winter of our discontent. Made glorious summer by this son of York” is predicated on the actual use of the sun in War of the Roses heraldry. For one thing, the center of the universe was a bad place to be in the Ptolemaic universe, because it was the bottom of the universe.

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