Dancing with Plain Jane

I once wrote a book – The Lieutenant’s Lover – which was a historical novel set mostly in the St Petersburg of 1917 and then, after a long gap, in 1945/46 Berlin.

(The book was my first and only proper romance, though it had big elements of historical adventure too. The heroine was forty-something by the time of the Berlin chapters. She was also a sergeant in the Red Army and had just experienced a pretty bruising thirty years. The cover designer chose to represent her as an extremely elegant young woman, with immaculate make-up and a jauntily fashionable chapeau. I don’t think he knew a lot about the Red Army.)

(Oh, and look, am I allowed two parentheses, even right at the start of an email? Yes? No? Yes. OK, so I also want to tell you that my German publisher liked the book but said that it was a bit different from my earlier fiction, which hadn’t had been primarily romance. So they asked, could I please adopt a penname for the work? I said yes. My full name is, as it happens, Thomas Henry Bingham, so I suggested that Tom Henry might work fine. They said OK, but they were thinking a woman’s name might be better …? I quite liked that idea, and was going to publish under the name Emma Makepeace, which I still think is a GENIUS name. Unfortunately, something happened to foul up the deal and that book was never published in German. I still have the petticoats though, just in case.)

Anyway, the point of this email is neither cover design, nor pennames.

I want to talk research. In this case, my research had to do with two well-studied historical periods, but really any kind of fiction might call for research. If you’re writing a psychological thriller where one character works in an advertising office, you need to know how advertising offices work. If there’s a bit of ocean-sailing adventure, you need to be able to tell port from starboard. Even if your work is totally speculative – full of androids working uranium mines on prison planets – you need to know something about uranium and the technology behind those androids and have a working model of the gravity / atmosphere / geology of your planet.

To do that research, you’ll naturally hit Wikipedia and you’ll pick up some books.

In my case, I learned a lot about the very interesting politics of Germany’s post-war occupation. The Western allies took very different approaches to the management of their sectors. The Soviets had, from the start, a no intention of anything other than a complete takeover of theirs.

I like my history and I gobbled up plenty of textbooks and learned loads. But there’s a huge difference between regular history and the stuff that’s of interest to a novelist. So yes, you need to know the broader political history of a time. (Or a bit of formal geology, if you’re researching uranium mines. Or a bit of marketing theory if you’re researching ad agencies.)

But ultimately you are in search of detail.

So take my characters in 1946 Berlin. I knew a lot about the politics. I knew a lot about reconstruction of the city and the teams of women chipping mortar off fallen bricks so the things could be reused. I had some curious little family details. (My wife’s grandparents were German/Poles who ended up in Munich at the end of the war and lived in a refugee camp for years.)

But none of that answered my questions. What did characters eat? What did they cook on? What occupation-bureaucracy did they have to deal with? With paper money almost worthless, what did they barter with?

The best answers to those questions didn’t come from formal history books, but from ordinary diaries and memoirs. It didn’t even matter if those memoirs were badly written. They just needed to be chatty, discursive, full of detail.

Those details are the ones to pounce on.

Same thing with uranium mines. It’s all very well to read things in Wikipedia like this: “In conventional mining, ores are processed by grinding the ore materials to a uniform particle size and then treating the ore to extract the uranium by chemical leaching.”

Good. You need to know that. But that doesn’t get us close to the felt experience of being a uranium miner. Uranium is radioactive. Humans need sheltering from the exposure. Open-cast uranium mining is therefore mostly done by miners operating inside sealed cabs in order to prevent them breathing in radioactive dust.

But what happens when the sun shines on one of those cabs? Do they get hot? Are they air-conditioned? Does the driver even have the ability to open a window? What are the washdown procedures after work? What happens if you have a mechanical breakdown and have to leave the cab?

Answering those questions will get your fictional miner ever closer to a believable character with a believable set of experiences.

And you’re not just looking for details. You’re hunting for words. With uranium, it’s words like yellowcake, roll-front deposits, Geiger counter, shear zone, gamma ray spectrometer, heap leach, contamination, haul truck, primary crusher, and so on. With a vocabulary like that, you can already feel the credibility of the story beginning to build.

Another trick: have your characters toss those words off as though they’re ordinary, not needing more explanation. It doesn’t really matter whether your reader completely understands the nature of yellowcake or knows how a primary crusher operates. If your characters use those terms with the fluency of the very familiar, your entire setting gains in authority. You’ll actually get more colour and credibility that way than if you burrow into a detailed description of the crusher. (Unless it matters of course. If you’re about to drop an aggressive robot into a primary crusher, then yes please, tell us about it.)

And accuracy?

Well, look, I’m an imagination-first kind of guy. If I’m considering whether or not to read a novel, the recommendation that “it’s very accurate on the topic of post-war Berlin / modern ad agencies / uranium mining,” is likely to make my heart sink. In the end, I think Imagination needs to dominate poor old Fact, the plain Jane of that sisterly pairing.

But the more you know, the more your imagination can leap. Very often, you’ll find yourself holding back from a sentence you might want to write because you don’t quite know the factual detail needed to support it. So accumulate the facts, then leave them behind. Or, if the facts are wonderful, place them front and centre. I once wrote a book about the 1920s/30s oil industry. There were two or three major oil strikes described in that book and they were all closely based on the actual facts of what happened.

And often fact just trumps anything that you might have dreamed up. A tiny example: in my research for the oil book, I read about a driller who fell out of the derrick onto the roof of the pumping shed and from there to the ground. He broke multiple bones but, while he was waiting for medical help, he said to his co-workers, ‘Well, ain’t you going to find a cigarette for this broken-assed son-of-a-bitch?’

That’s such beautiful colour, you can’t help but want to use it.

Even Plain Jane has her moments in the sun. Grab em. Use em. Have fun with them.

What are you researching? What bountiful colour and detail has Plain Jane given to you? And who out there writes under a penname of the opposite sex? Maybe one of you is actually called Emma and writes under the name Butch Ribeye, or something. I’m really hoping so.