This is just a quick note to officially switch from Blogger and begin posting here in WordPress. If you haven’t already, nose around the rest of the site (start at the Home page, which I’m kind of proud of), and then stay tuned as I begin posting here from now on. Also, if you used to follow me in Blogger, update your RSS feeds with the link near the bottom of the right-hand column, or simply paste this into your reader: https://snoekbrown.wordpress.com/feed/
And now–back to the fiction!
The big move is just around the corner: Look for a link to the new home of Beginner’s Mind in the next day or two.
Also, I have a new addition to the list of resources for helping Haiti. And if you haven’t already, check out Lori Ann Bloomfield’s post on compassionate writing.
My friend Lori Ann Bloomfield, over on her blog First Line, has posted an excellent comment on how writers can help not only Haitians but all human beings, simply through the act of writing. By writing more human characters, she says, we come to understand our fellow human beings better, and it’s a very small step from there to full compassion for all humanity. Better still, when we compassionately write fully realized, human characters, we invite our readers to a broader, more compassionate view of the world. It’s a beautiful post, and I encourage everyone to check it out.
Just a heads-up: I plan to migrate this blog over to WordPress next week. I like Blogger a lot and I’ve enjoyed posting here, but I’m moving for the website-like functionality of WordPress. I’ll keep this blog up through the rest of the month, and I’ll keep posting here for a while even after I’ve moved to WordPress, but early next week, look for a link to my new home on the Web.
For more on researching for fiction, go to the main research page.
(UPDATED with new links!)
As I said in the first post of this series, there’s a lot of advice out there. I’ve just hit some highlights that have intrigued me over the years, but if you want to push further and see what other ideas exist, here are some articles and resources I’ve found online. I’ve also included a short bibliography of some books that at least mention researching for fiction. And in case anyone was curious, yes, I did mention Anne Lamott and Jesse Lee Kercheval a lot, as well as a few references to Paul Lucey. That’s because when my wife and I first moved overseas, I only had room in my luggage for a handful of books, and at the time I was wholly enthralled with Bird by Bird and Building Fiction, and Story Sense is just a terrific reference guide for plotting, so they got to tag along for the ride. The other books on the list below are equally fantastic, though (I own them all), and I would have quoted them as well if I’d been able to bring them with me.
Web articles about research:
Bibliographies and databases:
Here are a couple of links to bibliographies on research resources, both of them special collections related to science fiction and fantasy research:
And, because my own research that started all this was on the American Civil War, I thought I’d toss in a few of the sites I found invaluable during my own writing (there are thousands of Civil War sites online — these are just the few I stopped at, and they were plenty):
Bibliography:
These are books I own. They discuss, at least in brief, some aspect of researching for fiction:
Also, check out some of the standard magazines and journals about writing. You might try Writer’s Digest or The Writer, but I do remember reading some terrific articles on research in The Writer’s Chronicle and Poets & Writers, and I strongly recommend both those publications.
Just when we thought we had things under control, that maybe since the aid was arriving we could let up on our contributions, a vicious 5.9 aftershock rocked Haiti again today. Which means we aren’t finished helping yet — not even close. So, once again, please visit my links page to find out how you can help.
For more on researching for fiction, go to the main research page.
So now you have all your research done and you’re ready to get back to the writing. But you’re writing fiction here, not a research paper—so how do you use this research you’ve done? Sometimes the answer is easy: you were looking for a particular detail, and you found it, and you just plug it in and keep on working. But other times your research will be background—you’d written a quick rough draft but needed to learn a lot more about the time period, or the industry, or the culture, or whatever it is you’re writing about, so you’ve spent days or weeks or even months plowing through piles of research, and now you need to return to that draft of yours and work in what you learned. And this is where things get tricky.
The simple answer is to always focus on the writing. If you learned what you studied, if you absorbed all that research you did, then you should be able to just start revising the text and the details will fall in on their own. But let’s be honest, writing is almost never as easy as shaking our heads and letting the genius sift down. You’re going to have to work at this, and it’s going to have to be precise and intentional.
So let’s set aside the writing for a minute and go bake a cake.
In his screenwriting book, Story Sense, Paul Lucey discusses working research into a story:
A certain amount of your research may be cited in the script, but it should not be dumped on audiences to impress them. Instead, research should be worked into the story in the same way that the history of the characters and the locations is worked in through a process called marbling. This term refers to information that reveals the characters and the plot indirectly, through dialogue and images. When marbling is done skillfully, audiences are hardly aware that they are receiving exposition.
Because we’re writers and therefore probably also book nerds, we might be tempted to think of marbling in terms of paper-dying, the art form in which you swirl inks and dyes on paper to produce wild, psychedelic patterns. But I think this is a poor metaphor, because the result is a disorienting churn of color that does not help anyone perceive either the larger picture or the individual hues. Instead, I think the term “marbling” as used for fiction is best related to marbling in baking. For those of you who’ve never been up to your elbows in flour, marbling in baking refers to swirling two contrasting batters—one light, one dark, usually vanilla and chocolate—into a single cake, so the baked cake comes out looking like marble (or like marbled paper). But bakers know that the secret to a good marbled cake is neither the separation of the flavors nor the blend of flavors, but the complement of flavors: we don’t want to taste chocolate and then vanilla, and we don’t want to taste chocolate-vanilla; we want to taste how chocolate and vanilla play off each other in a single bite.
In fiction, we “marble” our details in such a way that they neither stand out as a distinct list of details (“Look what I learned!”) nor blend in as indistinct jumbles of words. Instead, marbled details should work their way into a story so they complement the story—they show us details not to inform the reader but to inform the story, to provide depth to character, to drive the plot, to set the mood.
And we should never forget that this is the function of our research—to serve as details in a story. This can feel frustrating sometimes in the same way that cooking frustrates some people. You spend hours and hours in the kitchen, tossing up a huge mess and stacking dirty dishes you’ll just have to spend hours cleaning later, but the final result is a single plate of food that someone wolfs down in maybe 20 minutes, and then it’s over. Similarly, when you spend hours or days rubbing your weary eyeballs and your hands have gone dry from flipping pages and you’ve learned an entire history inside and out, it can be terribly frustrating to find that all that work boils down to a single detail, a phrase in a sentence. You are tempted, I bet, to pour on the details, to load in everything you learned just to prove that you did the work. But this is not why we did the research; we’re not out to prove anything, we’re out to tell a story.
Francine Prose, in Reading Like a Writer, puts it this way:
Details are what persuade us that someone is telling the truth—a fact that every liar knows instinctively and too well. Bad liars pile on the facts and figures, the corroborating evidence, the improbable digressions ending in blinds alleys, while good (or at least better) liars know that it’s the single priceless detail that jumps out of the story and tells us to take it easy, we can quit our dreary adult jobs of playing judge and jury and again become as trusting children, hearing the gospel of grown-up knowledge without a single care or doubt.
Yes, your research lends your fiction a certain authority, a sense that you know what you’re talking about, or at least your narrator does. A lot of great authors made sure they did know what they were talking about—when you read Hemingway’s vivid descriptions of lion-hunting in Africa, you know that old Papa Hemingway actually hefted a rifle and trekked out on safari, actually shot at the king of cats himself. But in Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott tells of writing a story about gardening based solely on research and on going to the source (in this case, a horticulturalist as well as dozens of happy home gardeners) and then catching people off guard when they assumed she herself was a gardener. “I’d let them know that I had only been winging it, with a lot of help from people around me. [. . .] ‘You don’t love to garden?’ they’d ask me incredulously, and I’d shake my head and not mention that what I love are cut flowers, because this sounds so violent and decadent [. . .].”
So you find only those details that are necessary, only the research that serves the story, and then you work it in where it’s necessary and only there. In her book Building Fiction, Jesse Lee Kercheval explains how Tim O’Brien (who, to be fair, was indeed a Vietnam veteran, so his details came first-hand) worked in whole lists of specific facts to lend realism to his story “The Things They Carried.”
As a first lieutenant and platoon leader, Jimmy Cross carried a compass, maps, code books, binoculars, and a .45-caliber pistol that weighed 2.9 pounds fully loaded. He carried a strobe light and the responsibility for the lives of his men. . . .
As a medic, Rat Kiley carried a canvas satchel filled with morphine and plasma and malaria tablets and surgical tape and comic books and all the things a medic must carry, including M&Ms for especially bad wounds, for a total weight of nearly 20 pounds.
The information here accomplishes several things at once. They give the narrator (and O’Brien himself) authority through the specificity of the details—the weight of packs, the caliber of firearm, the curious detail about the “M&Ms for especially bad wounds.” Only someone who’d been there, we would reason, could know details like that. The lists also inform us about the characters, “the cumulative impression they leave of a character’s rank and specialty,” as Kercheval puts it. (Notice that the medic carries comic books, too, which, combined with the M&M detail, tells us something about Rat Kiley the human being as well as Rat Kiley the medic.) And they move the story itself forward: the description of the platoon leader, with his weapons of war and his “responsibility for the lives of his men,” precedes the description of the medic, whose gear helps him heal the wounds of war, and this pairing creates a tension that propels the story forward.
But for the best example of how to use your research in your fiction—how to marble in the details so that they complement the story you’re telling—I will turn to the master, Cormac McCarthy, and his greatest novel so far, the brilliant historical novel Blood Meridian. (For a fascinating discussion of McCarthy’s own research and writing process, check out this rare interview, with John Jurgensen.)
In Blood Meridian, a group of men led by the violently mythic Judge Holden are running from a band of vengeful Native Americans; as one might expect in a Western, they are shooting at each other as they gallop across the West Texas desert, firing so much that the Judge’s men run out of ammunition. Actually, they have plenty of bullets and plenty of empty casings and are used to recycling their rounds by recasing their own ammo, but they have run out of gunpowder. So they run to the volcanic mountains to escape, and there on the burning peaks the Judge sets about making gunpowder by hand.
The process of making gunpowder involves chemically mixing potassium nitrate (saltpeter), sulfur powder, and charcoal. But these men are on the run, trapped at the top of a volcano—they’re not leisurely tinkering around with a chemistry set. McCarthy did his research, though, and he learned that human urine contains nitrogen and that saltpeter can be made from urine by mixing it with potash (wood ashes). He also must have discovered that sulfur naturally occurs in volcanic regions. And it wouldn’t be hard to come across charcoal at a volcano, either.
I did a little looking myself (okay, a very little—I just hit Wikipedia), and learned that just before the Renaissance, Europeans discovered a way to add liquid to the ingredients and create a kind of gunpowder paste, which they then dried and crushed to form gunpowder. And, according to the Wikipedia article, “gunners also found that it was more powerful and easier to load into guns.”
Perfect! But these men in Blood Meridian are on the run, in the middle of a shootout, fighting for their lives. We don’t have time to pause the action and explain all these technical, alchemical processes. We need gunpowder and we need it now! So McCarthy marbles—he keeps the action moving fiery and relentless even as he describes the powder-making process in grossly vivid detail and reveals volumes of insight into Judge Holden’s feral genius and his devlish nature:
We hauled forth our members and at it we went and the judge on his knees kneadin the mass with his naked arms and the piss was splashin about and he was cryin out for us to piss, man, piss for your very souls for cant you see the redskins yonder, and laughing the while and workin up this great mass in a foul black dough, a devil’s batter by the stink of it and him not a bloody dark pastryman himself I dont suppose and he pulls out his knife and he commences to trowel it across the southfacin rocks, spreadin it out thin with the knifeblade and watchin the sun with one eye and him smeared with blacking and reekin of piss and sulphur and grinnin and wieldin the knife with a dexterity that was wondrous like he did it every day of his life.
(For any chemistry nerds reading, I should point out that most information online explains that making gunpowder takes an incredibly long time, upwards of two days or more, so I know there’s absolutely no way that the judge’s men could concoct makeshift gunpowder on a mountaintop and reload and carry on their fight with the Native Americans in the span of time McCarthy describes in his novel. But we don’t care — the story has us, we are committed, and now we just want these guys to shoot the bullet.)
Tomorrow, a short summation and a list of links to other articles and books you might find useful.
If you haven’t already, please visit my links for charity and aid organizations that are helping Haiti. Also, today I discovered the website for the Clinton Bush Haiti Fund, which is another place you can donate (I’ve added it to the existing list as well). And as always, if you know of any news or any other organizations I can add here, let me know.
For more on researching for fiction, go to the main research page.
I’ve written about this before, but just to recap: Tom Franklin hates doing research. Yet his first two novels were historical fiction, which stuck Franklin doing the very thing he hates. Still, Franklin prefers to focus on the writing, to let the fiction drive his work (which is probably the way we all should work), so he developed a way to conduct the research he needed to do without letting it get in the way of his writing. The idea wasn’t his — he credits Steven Scarborough for the suggestion — but he made it his own.
As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, Franklin has a thing for details. The way he sees it, a story might be entertaining if you focus on character and plot, but the characters aren’t real and the plot won’t ring true without the help of minute details. “You can’t write convincingly unless you know the tiny details of a place, of people, buttons on their britches or zippers, how much their snuff costs, the caliber of their sidearm,” he once told interviewer Rob McClure Smith. But in Hell at the Breech, Franklin was writing about the late 1890s, a period he had little access to. So, how to get the details right?
Scarborough suggested he find an old Sears & Roebuck catalogue. “Everything in the world you could get you got through Sears & Roebuck,” Franklin told Smith. “I got one from 1897 and it’s filled with pictures of everything from Adzes to zebra lined boots. [. . .] This Sears catalogue’s got it all.”
The catalogue became his springboard into the fiction. He’d write and write (and revise as he went), and just keep plowing away at the story until he couldn’t write any more. He was dry; he needed a dip at the well. So he’d pull out his facsimile copy of the 1897 Sears & Roebuck catalogue and flip through it. Eventually, he’d find something — sometimes an item he was looking for, like, say, a pocket watch, but often he’d stumble across something he hadn’t expected, like a stereoscope for viewing photographs, a kind of Victorian-era version of our old 3-D View-Masters — and he’d start describing whatever he found. The catalogue, after all, contained drawings or diagrams of the items for sale, descriptions of what they were and how they functioned, ads explaining who might find them useful, and so on. An absolute wealth of information — practically a time machine. So Franklin would describe the item, would perhaps assign it to a character and let him or her use it, and just keep working over the bit until it developed into a scene. The next thing Franklin knew, the fiction was rolling along again and the story progressed.
Franklin got lucky, of course, that anyone was bothering to print facsimiles of the old Sears catalogue at all, let alone that it was from the same time period he was writing about. But it’s not hard to find similar items for yourself, and the more we writers come to need these books, the more our demand will create a market for them. That same 1897 Sears catalogue is actually available now through Amazon, as is an 1895 Montgomery Ward catalogue and an 1886 Bloomingdale’s illustrated catalogue. A quick search through your local library might also turn up books on the history of advertising, in which you can find ads and illustrations from years past. You can also find useful information in histories of clothing and costumes, antique furniture guides, even old cookbooks.
And while you’re there, look into the library’s newspaper archives. Most public libraries — even the small town libraries — will keep archives of the local papers, and many larger libraries will keep archives of major national papers as well. If your library is well funded, you might even be able to search through the microfilm or microfiche collections for newspapers that are decades, even centuries old. (If your library is not well funded, lobby your local government to increase library funding, and join your area Friends of the Library group to help raise money.)
I mention the newspapers because they’ll also have print advertising and can help add a little local color to your details, and while you’re there, you can also browse some of the community articles to see what people were writing their editors to complain about, what people were gossiping about, what the local community was interested in. Check out the photos, too — you can see what people were wearing, which, as Sherlock Holmes would tell you, can provide excellent character details. You can do the same with magazines, sometimes with surprising results (the library at one of the colleges I attended has the entire run of Playboy — in full color — on microfiche, though you have to know who to ask to get access to it and sorry, I’m not going to help you with that one).
When I was working on my Civil War novel, I found myself slowing down about halfway through and I started wondering how I was going to push on through. I thought about Franklin, in the same predicament while working on Hell at the Breech, and I decided to follow his advice: I shopped the catalogue. Of course, I don’t have a copy of that or any other historical catalogue, and living overseas as I do, it was going to be difficult to get one on short notice. But with some search guidance from a librarian (actually, my wife), I started poking around online and I stumbled across the excellent web site titled simply The Civil War. The site is good for all its history and essays and trivia, sure, but the pot of gold is their collection of Civil War-era Harper’s Weekly magazines, which they’ve scanned in and posted online. (The coolest thing about their project is that they preserved the text as text, so the magazines are fully searchable!) Now, not only did I have access to contemporary news about the war, but I also had letters, political cartoons, sketches of battles, and, best of all, advertising. Thanks to these magazines, I was able to add vivid realism to my battle descriptions, give depth to characters’ personal sentiments about the war, and include rich details about daily life. In one scene, my characters come across a few worn old books in a dead soldier’s rucksack, and I listed the titles, which I’d found on a bestseller list from 1863. In another scene, some characters are haggling over the price of a few blackmarket firearms, and I was able to describe some of them based on advertising in the magazine, which sold pistols alongside ladies’ stockings.
The Harper’s Weeklys weren’t as easily perused as a Sears catalogue, maybe, and they were comparatively limited in scope, but they got the writing going every time, and that’s the only point anyway — it is always the point — to get back to the writing.
Of course, once you shop the catalogue, you have to unpack all that stuff and arrange it, which is for some people the biggest trick of all. So, tomorrow, I’ll write about marbling….
Bonus link: For more recent cultural and material research, check out the delightful Retroland website. Remember Trapper Keepers? Yeah, so do they. Loads of nostalgic fun.
Obama has tweeted about Haiti — his first post on Twitter — and asked Americans to continue supporting Haitian relief efforts. UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon has called for troops and aid organizations to unclog the bottleneck of supplies, and indeed the US military (according to some, a source of the bottlenecking once we took control of the main airport in Port-au-Prince) has agreed to help speed the distribution of supplies. Yet as the death toll mounts, with some estimates now reaching more than 200,000 dead, survivors continue to be miraculously pulled from the rubble, alive and in dire need of food and medicine. That means it remains important — is perhaps more important now — to continue giving to relief efforts. There are reports now of fake support groups popping up on Facebook, which is unfortunate, but the list I put together a few days ago remains a good starting point for finding legitimate, carefully vetted aid organizations. Please check out that list and consider giving.
For more on researching for fiction, go to the main research page.
A few years ago, I was at the big national conference of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs, and a friend of mine, Tom Franklin, was on a panel discussing research in fiction. Franklin joined the panel by virtue of his historical novels Hell at the Breech and Smonk (particularly Hell, which is based on a true story), but Franklin freely admits he dislikes research, so I knew the panel discussion would be fun. The panel did turn out to be a pretty lively one, frequently digressing into friendly banter and swapped anecdotes between Franklin and his friends and fellow panelists Julianna Baggott, Justin Cronin, Jennifer Vanderbes, and Mark Winegardner. In fact, the stories the panelists started telling sometimes had little to do with research — the group quickly became just a bunch of practiced storytellers trying to outdo each other — but they all did a terrific job of bringing their rambling stories back to the point at hand: research.
Among the planned topics for that panel, some (“what really happened!”) seemed fairly gratuitous, and others (“what to look for and how to look for it”) fairly dry and mechanical. But there was one point that people keep debating, and after the comments from this panel, I’m not sure why, because the answer seems pretty simple. The conference program lists this point three different ways: “negotiating between historic fact and story-truth,” “approximating what can’t be looked up,” and “what’s better made-up,” but they all boil down to one axiom: sometimes it’s better to shoot the bullet.
I should confess here that I don’t recall who told this story. I know it was a guy, and I know it wasn’t Franklin. That leaves Justin Cronin and Mark Winegardner, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t Winegardner. That should make it Cronin’s story, but my memory keeps adding a fourth guy, tacked on the end of the panel as a late addition, and I don’t want to put words in Cronin’s mouth that weren’t his. But until someone corrects me on this (I e-mailed Franklin, but he doesn’t remember, either), we’ll say it was “Cronin” who told this story.
And the story goes like this: “Cronin” was working on an action sequence in which a character has been shot in the leg but must run to escape his enemies. He has no surgical experience and no time to stop and dig out the bullet even if he knew how, but he also cannot run effectively with that bullet still lodged in his thigh. What he does have is an almost superhuman expertise in firearms, and he has a pistol. So he does what any desperate action hero would do in this situation: He aims his pistol at his own thigh, muzzle pressed into the open wound and angled along the same trajectory as the original bullet. He grits his teeth. Then he pulls the trigger and fires a second bullet into his leg. The result is something like projectile-billiards — his bullet strikes the first bullet and knocks it out the far side of his thigh, and his bullet then continues on the same path and exits the same wound. No more bullets, and now he can run. And off he goes.
We in the audience all laughed at this story, as did the guy who told it. It is a ridiculous scene, he admitted. (In my head, I recalled the scene in Rambo III when Rambo, out in the deserts of Afghanistan and wounded in the stomach, uncases two rifle bullets, pours the gunpowder into his wound, and ignites it — fire bursting from his muscled torso into the desert night — to cauterize the wound). Still, “Cronin” said, shooting the bullet was just too cool to pass over, and it sounded vaguely plausible to him. He wanted it to work.
He’d already been poring over medical references and firearms manuals in the course of writing this book of his, but he’d never come across anything that would either confirm or contradict his idea to shoot the bullet. This sounded like specialist information, the kind of thing you could probably only deduce from experience. So “Cronin” went to the source and called a doctor friend of his. He explained the situation, described how his hero would shoot the bullet, and then asked his doctor friend if such a thing would work.
His friend laughed in his face.
“Of course that wouldn’t work!” the doctor said. “Medically speaking, it’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard — and the odds against it are astronomical!”
Disheartened, “Cronin” began thinking then and there of alternative possibilities, but he didn’t get far in his silent, dejected reverie, because the doctor leaned in close and said, “But the way you describe it, shooting the bullet sounds cool as hell. You should let him do it anyway!”
And that was the lesson for the day: Sometimes the research can get in the way of good writing. Sometimes you have to say to hell with realism, to hell with the facts, and just write a cool story. Sometimes you have to shoot the bullet.
This doesn’t mean you can get away with shoddy writing. You don’t always have to operate within the rules of the real world, but you do have to operate within the rules of your established world — you have to remain true to your story. Take my novella, for example, which involves a couple of teenage boys running around causing trouble just outside Boerne, Texas, in the woodsy little subdivision where I grew up. I have spent a lot of time constructing complicated calendars and character note cards, and I’ve gone through every line of the story checking that the timeline adds up. I can’t say my character is 14 in the winter and 15 the summer, for instance, without knowing that he has a birthday sometime in the spring (it’s March 14, if anyone cares). I don’t have to mention the birthday at all, but I do have to know that I can’t mention his birthday in the fall if it had already happened in the spring. The rules of my story won’t allow it.
But I’m not tied to the physical details of my old neighborhood. This is fiction, after all. So I have my characters tearing loose in a version of my own back yard even though the reference sites for each boy’s house are nowhere near my parents’ actual home. I can manipulate geography because I’m not drawing a map — I’m writing fiction. The point is not that people reading my story can go out to my old subdivision and find the secret hiding place where these boys spend their time — they can’t, because the geography is imprecise. The point is that someone can read the descriptions and, if they know Boerne or my old subdivision, they can recognize the general landscape (which I hope people can).
When I was an undergrad student, Madeleine L’Engle once visited my college as a visiting speaker. Among the many insights she touched on during her audience Q&A session, she explained what she saw as the difference between fact and truth. Facts, she said, are details, data, pieces of information that we can record and prove and quantify . . . and manipulate. They are not inherently true. On the other hand, truth is not always dependent on facts — truth is just as much something we can feel or something we believe as it is something we can point to or measure. And fiction, according to L’Engle, is often more truthful than factual.
Fiction writer and memoirist Bill Roorbach has alluded to a similar phenomenon in his own work. He likes to joke that his greatest frustration is when he reads from his nonfiction and people challenge him, shouting out from the audience, “That didn’t happen! You’re making that up!” but when he reads a piece of fiction, people creep up to him and lean in conspiratorially, wink at him, and whisper, “I know that’s based on a true story — I know all that really happened to you.” The point, Roorbach says, is that people often confuse fact for truth, so when he writes a story full of truth, people mistake it for fact, and when he writes an essay full of truth, people want only the facts.
We are not in the fact business. We are in the truth business. It doesn’t matter what form our work takes — fiction, essays, poetry, scripts, aphorisms, whatever — so long as we strive to tell the truth. And sometimes, telling the truth, or even just telling a damn good story, requires us to bend or even ignore the facts.
When Tom Franklin was writing Hell at the Breech, his first novel, he spent a lot of time interviewing people who knew the true story, whose relatives had lived through it and passed down their version through the generations. He wrestled and agonized for a long time over how to reconcile all the variations of the local legend, how to write the most factually accurate story possible and please all the folks he’d talked to. But eventually he realized he couldn’t, and in his author’s note in the book, he explains that his is a work of fiction, not fact. Once he let go of trying to get in all the factual details, he discovered he could tell the truest story possible.
Which isn’t to say Franklin gave up doing research. What he did, though, was a specific kind of research best suited to his writing style, something I like to call “shopping the catalogue,” but that’s for tomorrow’s post . . . .
The situation in Haiti is getting better, but it’s also getting more desperate. Supplies are bottlenecked, relief organizations are tripping over each other, and what little order people managed to cobble together in the immediate aftermath is deteriorating. Let’s not make this sound prettier than it is. But let’s also focus on what is getting accomplished: Supplies are arriving and are getting distributed. In fact, despite the bottleneck, supplies are running out as fast as they’re arriving, which means relief organizations still need your help. When you return from the public celebrations of the Reverend Dr. King’s life, and before you switch on the Golden Globes, take a moment to give a donation. See this list of organizationsfor more information.
UPDATE: United Arab Emirates, where we live, is joining other Arab nations in sending aid to Haiti, both through Khalifa Bin Zayed Charity Foundation and through the UAE branch of the Red Crescent Society, the organization we’re donating to.
For more on researching for fiction, go to the main research page.
A lot of great writers started out as journalists, and critics have offered a lot of reasons for that shared background. Journalists know how to work under deadline, they have an instinct for finding a story, they’ve learned how to find an angle or a hook to draw a reader in, they have developed a sense of concision and compression in language. But I think there is at least one reason that critics tend to overlook: Journalists know how to interview people.
I’ve been writing so far about how to conduct research for fiction, but up till now that research has been primarily textual — books, articles, websites. However, sometimes research in books or online isn’t enough. There are some things you can’t learn by reading, but Hemingway’s or Annie Proulx’s examples aside, there are also a lot of things you can’t learn by living through or traveling to, either. For some things, you have to go to the source, you have to talk to other people who have lived through it, who did travel there — you have to talk to people who know.
This is a hard thing for many introverted writers to do. We’re much happier holed up at our desks with our desk lamp, our music, and our cat for company. We’re writers, we tell ourselves, because we don’t like to talk. So actually tracking down people and meeting them is at best a chore — at worst, terrifying. But hey, you’ve managed to get out and meet a librarian by now, right? (Right?) So you can do this too. Talking to people isn’t really much different from the kind of research you’ve probably been doing, except instead of asking questions in a search engine or a database or a catalogue, you’re asking a human being. And sometimes, this is the only way it can work.
The simplest thing to do is start with people you already know. For example: I’m currently working on a story in which one of the characters is a Mexican-American who understands English fine but does not speak English. I can write the character without any problems, because I grew up in the Texas Hill Country, in a small town with a significant, proud Hispanic population. My perspective remains irrefutably white, of course, but this isn’t really a problem in the story—most of what we see of this guy is through a white perspective. But he needs to speak, and I need his speech to be authentic. Yet no matter how many Hispanic friends I hung out with at lunch or on weekends, and no matter how many Hispanic coworkers I worked with (this character is in fact based loosely on a guy I used to mow lawns with), my Spanish is limited, academic, and frankly, terrible. I’ve used the language in stories before, but it’s an issue I always wrestle with. I can (and have) used dictionaries and online translators to temporarily write the dialogue I’ve used, but we all know this is inauthentic — no one speaks their own language the way it’s written in textbooks or constructed by translators. So, for my Mexican-American character’s voice to ring true, I turned to some of my Spanish-speaking friends from back in high school, because they can help me with the spoken rhythms of the language, the idioms and the slang. (This is an on-going project, by the way, so if any of my friends want to volunteer as translators, I’d love to hear from you!)
More recently, I learned a wealth of invaluable information while working on that Civil War novel I keep mentioning. One of the characters in that book has the bizarre habit of skinning wolves and wearing their pelts as clothes — he even wears a real wolf’s face as a mask. But I’ve never been a hunter and I’m now a vegetarian, not to mention that many wolf populations are protected today, so this not only was something I was unfamiliar with, it is something I’ll never have a chance to try for myself. I tried reading some guides online but the specific information I was looking for was difficult to find, and besides, the skinning and preparation of these pelts is, for my character, an intensely personal process, so I needed some kind of inside information. I put out the call online, and several friends came through for me immediately, including my friend Amy Smith Hicks, who is a self-described “country girl” and regularly helps dress and butcher deer during the annual hunting seasons; better still, members of her family are in the taxidermy business, so she had some insights there as well. Amy not only was able to explain the mechanics of the process better than the manuals I was reading, but she also described the sounds and smells of the skinning process, how the skin feels as you strip it from the carcass, and some personal tips for an easier job. These are details I would never have gotten from reading a book or even watching a video.
If you’re lucky, you can do the same with other complicated professional information as well. Despite the stereotypes, most writers are not insular homebodies who hang out only with other writers, if with anyone. You probably have friends or acquaintances in a wide breadth of fields, from grocery store clerks to construction workers to computer support technicians to police officers to accountants to college professors. You also conduct a lot of business with people in various professions. When you get your cable installed, talk to the person hooking up your tv. When you go to the doctor for a check-up, ask questions about your characters’ fictional conditions.
Sometimes, though, you’ll simply need to dive in and play reporter, to call up a professional or an organization and start asking questions. Say you’re writing a crime thriller but you’ve never lived in a dangerous neighborhood, you don’t know any cops, you’ve never even seen a firearm up close. Call up your police department and request a ride-along. (You can usually do the same for your local fire department and sometimes the paramedics as well.) Or let’s say you’re writing about an employee at an animal shelter. Call up your local humane society and ask about volunteering; while you’re there, talk to other volunteers, talk to the vets.
Some professions or people are going to be trickier than others, of course. I don’t recommend diving into dangerous situations without a LOT of preparation and help from other professionals, and even then, I would never condone any writer participating in dangerous or illegal activities just to write a story. When in doubt, go back to the old rule of writing what you know. But you should embrace a certain sense of adventure and talk to interesting people; your readers want to read about those people. Talk to professionals in the fields your characters work in; your readers they want to know that you know what you’re talking about, or at least that Val, your lawn-mowing main character, knows his way around a commercial-grade Walker mower.
When I was hospitalized in 1999 with a bleeding ulcer, the doctors explained to me how they would insert a gastrointestinal scope down my throat and take a look around inside me to find the ulcer, and then they’d use the laser attached to the scope to suture the ulcer shut. I was going to be unconscious for all this, they assured me, and then I asked what struck them as a strange question: Would they be recording the scope? Sure, they explained, they would keep a video record of the procedure for reference later. I said, “Will I be able to see this video?” They reminded me I would be under anesthesia, but I clarified that I wanted access to the video after the procedure. “I just want to see what it looks like,” I said. I had no plans for the information — at the time, I’d lost a couple pints of blood and was lying weak and woozy on a gurney, already in the surgery room where they were preparing the scope, so I wasn’t thinking about fiction at all. But I knew I needed to see that video, and indeed, a few weeks afterward, I returned to the hospital and asked to see my file. I watched the video and asked a lot of questions about what some of the images meant, what they’d done during the procedure, what the instruments did and how they worked. And then I forgot it. It became just another piece of information I knew, trivial and quirky but not of much immediate use. But sure enough, more than four years later I had an idea for a story that involved a scope down the esophagus, and I remembered that video; my story “Horror Vacuui,” about a sword-swallower with a dangerous case of intestinal blockage, would not be the same if I hadn’t seen first-hand what the inside of my own bloody intestines looked like. These details matter, and sometimes the best way to get them is from the source itself.
That’s why, tomorrow, I’m going to offer some specific advice based on a story about a doctor and how you, too, can “shoot the bullet.”
Relief efforts in Haiti are going slowly and the situation is dangerously precarious, but a lot of supplies have already arrived on the island and volunteers are working hard to help the Haitian people. The harder they work and the more they give, the more they’re going to need your donations! Please see my list of charity and action organizations, and as usual, if you know of more I need to list, please let me know.
The research series is on hold for the weekend (I live in a Muslim country, where our weekend is Friday and Saturday), so look for Tip #3 on Sunday.
In the meantime, if you’re on Facebook: Today a friend of mine who is a Unitarian minister alerted me to a “Prayers & Thoughts for the people of Haiti” event on Facebook, hosted by the group “Long Live His Holiness the Dalai Lama.” I’m certain there are many other groups associated with other faiths or with secular organizations who are hosting similar pages/events, so look them up.
And keep those donations going!
Samuel Snoek-Brown 
