A hog-nosed skunk and a new tin roof

I knew a novelist, a good one, who believed in research. For her first book, she made notes so extensive that they were longer than the book itself.

I do not recommend this approach.

But no research? None at all? I don’t recommend that either. Even if you write straight-up fantasy, that’s probably not the right approach to take.

Research falls, I think, into two broad categories. One optional, one really not.

The optional kind of research is the sort you might do for a university dissertation. Ages ago, I wrote a book about the oil industry in the interwar years. I needed to know which oilfields were opened when, and by who, and how it was done. I needed to know about the major companies and the struggles for rights and the advances in technology. When it came to my climactic chapters around the Second World War, I needed to find out about PLUTO, the PipeLine Under The Ocean – which pumped fuel from England to Normandy, in the wake of D-Day.

All this is Sensible, Serious Stuff. If you’re writing historical fiction, you know you need to do it, and you don’t need me to lecture you.

But that kind of work simply means that your novel won’t end up being defective at a broad historical level. It’s research that ensures you don’t have your heroes drilling in Saudi Arabia, when they should have been drilling in Iran.

The second – more interesting – category of research falls under the general heading of “digging around to see if you can find details to enrich your story.”

For example…

Finding words

Words flavour a text. My oil book was peppered with terms like anticline (‘an arch-shaped structure buried deep beneath the ground’). Hog-nosed skunk. A coring barrel with jammed flaps. Baling tool. Prime steam coal. Meat cakes and yogurt. Calico flags. Wellhead pressure.

Those words deliver flavour – excitement even. The smell and feel of a place and time.

Readers don’t even have to know exactly what these things are. When I spoke about the coring barrel, my text dwelled mostly on the fact that the flaps had jammed and needed to be forced open. If my readers had been asked to sketch a coring barrel, they’d have been unable to do so. But it didn’t matter. It felt real, felt exotic,felt authoritative.

Finding details

That book also had a surprising amount of numerical detail.

What pressure does oil exert at the wellhead? What was the going rate per acre for land around the Signal Hill oil strike? How high was a gusher capable of throwing oil? What length were drill pipes?

But the book was also full of food details, transport details, military details.

All these things act as authenticators (“this guy knows what he’s talking about”) and as flavourings, lifting the whole text. Readers don’t in fact become expert on a place and time by reading fiction – but they feel as if they almost do. They get that excitement of new discovery.

Finding anecdotes

That oil book borrowed freely from life. The description of at least two of the oil-discoveries were based very closely on what actually happened. But often the details that really work are genuinely tiny – wholly immaterial to the story. So here, for example, is a piece of dialogue – an oilman telling a story (drawn from fact) about a recent incident:

“They were bringing pipes up, so one of the roughnecks had run up eighty foot to rack ’em as they came. But he musta lost a hold of the ladder or something, because the next thing I hear is a yell. Guy comes tumbling down from eight feet up, hits a beam in the derrick, spins over and lands on the pump shed, new tin roof, nice and springy. He looks at me. I looks at him. He says ‘Gotta cigarette?’ I only had my chew-tobacco, so I says, ‘No.’ He looks at me, real sad, and says, ‘Well, don’t just stand there. Go get a smoke for this dumb, broken-assed son-of-a-bitch.’”

That kind of loveliness, in my experience, comes more often from research than from pure imagination.

Genres other than historical fiction

Now I said, up top, that you should do your research even if your book doesn’t obviously demand it. And you should.

Let’s say your book is set in a location you know well – Berlin, London, New York, wherever. You still need to find the little bits of glitter that bring those places to life. Contrast these alternatives:

“They passed by a chunk of the old Berlin Wall, left standing as a reminder of how things were.”

“They passed by a chunk of the old Berlin Wall, graffitied and decaying.”

“A stump of the old Berlin Wall had been left standing. The old grey cement still bore its original graffiti. A spray of huge red-and-white magic mushrooms surrounding a man – Honecker? Brezhnev? – in a grey suit and a bewildered expression. The stump was only two panels wide and contained part of a slogan, ‘Wer macht …’ They passed by in the silence those memorials still created.”

Now, to be clear, any of those might be right for your book. Do you need to pass on fast through that moment, or do you need to dwell? That all depends on what weight you want to give it. But would your imagination come up with those magic mushrooms? The bewildered Honecker? I found those things by rooting around online. I don’t think I’d have come up with that idea myself. In fact, I didn’t find the Honecker and the mushrooms in the same image, but that doesn’t matter. Research is there to provoke the imagination. Your job is to go and hunt down those provocations.

If you’re writing about diamond trading in Antwerp, then learn about it. Not just the technicalities, but the details. How does a diamond get polished? How does the transport work? How do the bourses work? Find the details and pass them on.

Oh, and fantasy? You think that fantasy needs no research?

Well… the best fantasy always has its roots in something real. A place that’s just full of castles and princesses and magic seems unanchored in anything. A place that also has jerkins with horn buttons, and falconers with a variety of hoods for the birds, and haymaking done with scythes and ricks, and libraries cluttered with medieval French and degenerate Latin… that place you already half-believe in, so when the magic happens, you believe in that, too.

If there’s a general moral to these musings, it’s this: fiction is most powerful when it’s most specific. And your imagination has its limits. Research breaks those limits – and turns up jewels. Find them, use them, pass them on.

FEEDBACK FRIDAY / A calico flag

Dig out any passage from your book where a detail – or several details, or the whole passage – was inspired by some bit of reading or other research.

Give us the normal 250-300 words. If you want to tell us more about the research and how it embedded itself in your passage, then you be you – and give yourself a flower.

Please title your post in this format: title / genre / [anything else we need to know]. That will help others navigate a big old forum with speed. When you’re ready, you can post your work here.

Til soon.

Harry