Mary Catelli's Erraticly Updated and Exceedingly Ill-Organized Journal

Was reading a work where one character is lecturing two others about the religion of their country -- no, the two are not foreigners, nor is the knowledge esoteric in any way.  It's elementary and basic, something that any old inhabitant, even an impious one, would have just picked up by the time of being adult.
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superversive is reposting old LJ posts on his new site.  Including rewriting some old ones he did for an old meme, some of which are about style:  Quakers in Spain and Teaching Pegasus to crawl.  Which are interesting enough in themselves and have inspired me to post about reading primary source and your writing style.

This is just about primary source in your native language, or at least the language you write in.  Hmm, maybe translations, too if they are not too recent.
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Having told you how you should do it, I will now tell you why I recommend that all aspiring writers read a lot of primary sources, from as many eras and places as they can pull off.  0:)

It's not for research purposes.  It may prove useful for that in the long run, but the recommendation includes eras and places that you have no interest in writing in.  Indeed there's enough primary source floating about that it would be a trick and half to sample a lot of it and manage to use it all as research.  That's not its primary benefit.
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One of the great offenses against world-building is to interject modern thinking into eras where neither the technology nor the social structure would have produce it.

Very easy to do by default if you haven't done enough historical reading -- especially of primary source -- when you don't realize that what comes natural to you is not the nature of the universe.  And a grave danger when dealing with eras where we have very little documentation so it's hard to piece together.  However. . . .

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One thing that happens with reading lots of primary sources and getting into worlds unlike your own is that it gives you bright ideas for story.

Then it gives you a conundrum on how to convince your readers of the idea.

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Was fooling about with various possibilities about a story, involving travel in a steampunk world, and at one point, thought of an official asking for their papers. . . .

Ah, the powers of reflex.

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One reason I like fantasy is that while you have to finagle your world-building to get it, you can usually get all the plot devices you need out of the magic.  Massive infant mortality, rampant disease, wide-spread famine -- if they are not plot relevant, they are gone.


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