Katherine M. Lawrence on Constructing Medieval Japan for a Novel
Today, Katherine M. Lawrence blogged about the challenges of writing historical fiction. Constructing a compelling world with consistent rules is one of the challenges (and fun) of writing my Pillow Book of a Samurai series—Japan in 1175 C.E. People in Medieval times did not regard themselves as Medieval. They were as modern as it got–even if it was the year 1200. The challenge for the author who is recreating a world in an historic time period is that the author knows too much—about 840 years too much, in my case, and some of the stuff that happened 700 years ago, though it may seem old to those of our period, would not have existed 800 years ago....