Thoughts on Writing #43: Research Is Love.: seanan

Thoughts on Writing #43: Research Is Love.

I'm in the home stretch now, because this is the forty-third essay in my fifty-essay series on the business, craft, and never-ending cookie party that is the wonderful world of writing. If I seem to be getting a little bit punchy, it's because I've given up sleep until my deadlines are met. These essays are all based around my original fifty thoughts on writing, which were written in no particular order. This explains a lot. Thanks for sticking it out this far. Our thought for today:

Thoughts on Writing #43: Research Is Love.

Context is also love. Bearing that in mind, here's today's expanded thought:

Your ass is for sitting on, not for talking out of. If your characters are supposed to be gun experts, talk to some people who shoot guns. Read some books about guns. If the books don't make sense to you, hand your manuscript pages to someone who knows guns and say "please fix." My original draft of Feed literally included "INSERT VIROLOGY HERE," because when I wrote that chapter, I hadn't finished designing my virus. I finished my virus, double-checked my epidemiology, went back, and finished that scene. If you don't know what you're talking about, learn enough to fake it.

Authors very rarely write about characters that are exactly like them, down to the classes they took in college and the things they know how to cook for dinner. In almost all cases, even when writing "realistic fiction," we're going to be writing about characters who know things that we, as authors, don't necessarily know. Sure, we'll probably stick them in our areas of interest, because those areas interest us, but how do we deal with the fact that our characters actually know things we don't? How do we make it work?

It's time to talk about research, faking it, and when it's acceptable to bluff. Ready? Good. Let's begin.

You Don't Know Everything.

Let's start this from a very simple premise: you don't know everything. Before you get insulted, let me stress that I don't know everything, either. Neither does that guy over there, unless that guy happens to be some sort of deity, in which case, it's probably best that you don't bother him. The world in which we live is full of things, full of facts, and full of stuff that we don't know.

Ignorance and stupidity are not the same thing. Not knowing something doesn't make you dumb; it makes you someone who has not yet learned something. Believing that we must know everything in order to be smart, on the other hand, runs a decent chance of making us dumb, since once you've decided that you know something, it becomes a lot harder to actually learn. Especially as authors, it's important that we remember that we're allowed to have areas of specialization, areas we know a little bit about, and areas in which we are completely uneducated. We're not expected to be walking encyclopedias, capable of speaking with authority on every subject known to man.

We are, however, expected to do our research.

Research. It Does a Body Good.

There are a great many ways in which to do research. You can read books (recommended). You can talk to people who are actually working in the field or fields that you're writing about (also recommended). You can look it up on the Internet (recommended with strong reservations). And, if you're writing about something practical, rather than theoretical, you can try to set up whatever situation you're describing and see what happens.

For book research, it's a good idea to check with people you know who have some interest in the topic and see whether they have any recommendations. Keep in mind that their biases will inform their suggestions. If you were to ask me for books on the Black Death, I would provide a wide variety of sources that support the hemorrhagic fever theory (my personal best candidate for the source of the pandemic). I would not, however, be able to provide you with many sources that coherently argue for bubonic plague as the source of the Black Death, because those sources are not relevant to my interests. They don't fit my biases, and so they don't remain in my library. It's a good idea to get book recommendations from more than one person, if at all possible.

For personal research, keep in mind that when you ask people questions, even if you're asking them questions about something they really love to talk about, you are asking them to do you a favor. They're under no obligation to talk to you, or to point you in the right direction. Be polite. Be direct. If they tell you they can't help you, be understanding, and move on to the next name on your list. Most writers are happy to help each other out—I've been a subject matter expert for several people, on different topics—but even if you're asking them to talk about their favorite thing in the entire universe, you're asking them to do you a favor. They don't have to do it. They're under no obligation to help you out. So keep that in mind, and be nice.

Also remember that if you're asking someone who is an actual subject matter expert for help, you're admitting that they know more than you do. Don't correct them just so that you'll be able feel smart. Take notes, ask questions, and consult multiple sources. Yes, experts can be wrong. No, they won't be inclined to keep helping you if you argue with everything they say. (Please note that I am not saying "take every word as golden gospel." If someone says something you know is wrong, you should absolutely ask about it. But if I ask "how does this work?" and then answer everything you say with "no, it works this way," you're probably going to hit me with a brick and refuse to finish our tutorial.)

For Internet research, remember that absolutely everyone gets to look like an expert on the Internet. You can find real facts about real things, but you need to check and cross-check them, because you can also find fake facts, bullshit, conjecture, unchecked references, lies, damned lies, and statistics. The Internet makes it easy to not only get things wrong, but to spread that wrong information far and wide, infecting unsuspecting researchers like yourself. I love the Internet. It makes my job much easier. I also hate the Internet, because it turns everyone into an expert, and two-thirds of the "expert opinions" created by the Internet are wrong. I can usually ignore this, but when those "experts" try to give me their expert opinions on things I actually, y'know, studied, I sort of see red.

Use the Internet to find out where to start looking. Learn how to tell the real facts from the fake facts, and then go nuts.

What Do You Mean, "Practical"?

Practical research is...well, think Mythbusters. Kids, don't try this at home.

Sometimes, you have a question so weird, or a scenario so out-to-lunch, that no one can answer it/tell you how it would go. Those are the situations that call for practical testing. Please do not take this as a license to blow yourself up, as I do not wish to be sued by your estate. That said, there's little replacement for hands-on experience. Go to a firing range when you're writing about characters with guns. Go hiking in Muir Woods when you're writing about characters who go hiking in the woods. And so on. Yes, this can extend all the way to "build a flame-spitting robot dinosaur"; if you choose to take it that far, you'll be very welcome at Burning Man.

My best recommendation regarding practical research is that you do some book learnin' first, just so you'll know what you're in for. I do not, for example, recommend hiking in any forest without first learning about the local wildlife, as rattlesnakes do not respect "sorry, didn't know you were here" as a reason not to bite you. I also recommend taking gun safety courses before visiting the range, and learning how not to blow your fingers off before experimenting with fireworks. Don't break any local laws, don't break yourself, and if you can, don't break any windows.

Why Am I Doing All This?

Because learning is fun! And because it will not only make your book or story better, it will make you a better author. Research. It's the gift that keeps on giving.

archangelbeth

May 25 2010, 19:32:53 UTC 7 years ago

New comment

When internet-searching on some subjects (I use it for medical ones), it can help a lot to add site:gov to the query words. At the very least, and this is hugely important, it weeds out YahooAnswers. (I swear, if YahooAnswers said the Sun was hot, I'd go outside with a thermometer...)

Which is mostly a tip for searching the fertile ground of misinformation and badly-phrased data that is the Web.

janetmiles

May 25 2010, 20:26:49 UTC 7 years ago

site:edu is often useful as well.

7 years ago

May 25 2010, 19:40:17 UTC 7 years ago

Research is why I'm knee-deep in art history degree programmes and going "Oooh, why didn't I take that in school, too?"

And GoogleBooks. I know we all have icky copyright issues with them, but there's a good chunk of medical and other texts with previews of useful things. Such as travel guides to cities you've never been to. And with that, the street level of Google Maps is my god.

May 26 2010, 02:54:06 UTC 7 years ago

Street level Google Maps is definitely a part of my personal pantheon.

mariadkins

ohari

May 25 2010, 19:40:55 UTC 7 years ago

I love you, man.

Also, if you need a gun geek, I am here for you.

May 26 2010, 02:54:22 UTC 7 years ago

Awesome!

beccastareyes

May 25 2010, 19:51:02 UTC 7 years ago

I know at least once a week on 'ask an astronomer', we get a question from someone who is writing a novel and needs help with planets, space travel or some hand-wavy stuff about physics to justify their magic technology. Heck, just a week ago I got to answer the questions about explosions on a gas giant moon large enough to shove it out of orbit*.

If I am representative of many scientists, we love to talk about our work to people who are interested. Provided you are not a crackpot or trying to convert us, of course.

Also, I've found that the best way to have fun while writing is to not tell stories about things that are boring to research. If the idea of slogging through orbital mechanics fills you with dread, perhaps making a gritty hard SF story about ice miners regularly jetting around the Saturn system is not your thing.

* In which I got to tell friends 'you underestimated the depth of your crater if it's the size you say it is -- it's a lot deeper than a mile'. Which lead to a lot of giggling, because we are all geeks and the idea of a character blowing a large hole in a large moon via magic is funnier when you realize it's a bigger hole than you thought.

keristor

May 25 2010, 20:24:59 UTC 7 years ago

"If the idea of slogging through orbital mechanics fills you with dread, perhaps making a gritty hard SF story about ice miners regularly jetting around the Saturn system is not your thing"

On the other hand, some of us get so interested in the orbital mechanics that we never get round to, well, writing the story. Or if we do it's about orbital mechanics and gets called "the sort of SF which makes Asimov's SF look 'soft'." I think there needs to be a balance. Probably one of those really accurate chemical ones which cost millions...

dornbeast

deire

May 25 2010, 19:55:50 UTC 7 years ago

Your virology makes me flail with glee.

May 26 2010, 15:02:48 UTC 7 years ago

That makes me a happy girl. :)

Deleted comment

May 26 2010, 13:33:06 UTC 7 years ago

May I butt in here? I was raised on food stamps too. But sometimes they're a necessity. My disabled son - raised by his grandmother - moved in with us last Summer. We've struggled to make ends meet. I gave up back in the Winter and applied for food stamps for him. He gets enough that it's greatly helped our budget - and it allows him to shop for the foods that he loves. :)

mskauri

May 25 2010, 20:09:42 UTC 7 years ago

Another outstanding installment! YAY for research! Especially when it involves food!

I'm a sucker for sharing info if I can--or for at least connecting people who have info with those who need it.

If I can ever help you, you know how to reach me!

May 26 2010, 15:04:11 UTC 7 years ago

I totally do.

kyburg

May 25 2010, 20:35:30 UTC 7 years ago

*sniggers* I learned how to use the inter-library loan system doing my research for Man From UNCLE stories. And yes, I copped to it when asked. What was gained? (Mind you, this is the late 70's, early EARLY 80's - Reagan isn't even in office yet.)

What do you want to know THAT for? (Russian, this that the other)

And anything that will knock you out THAT fast? Is FAR more likely to kill you than anesthetize you. Find something else and write a better scene.

Never finished the story, but I sure had a blast. ^^

May 26 2010, 15:04:20 UTC 7 years ago

Wooooooooooow.

jerusha

May 25 2010, 20:57:21 UTC 7 years ago

Wikipedia is useful.

Yes, I just heard the intake of breath as the entire Internet gets ready to shriek, "What?!"

Wikipedia is useful if you apply it correctly. Find the article on what you're looking up. Read the article if you like, but don't feel required to. What you're there for are the footnotes. If the page you're reading points to a web page at cdc.gov? Go there and read the original!. If it cites a textbook, you now have all the details to pick up a used copy or pry one out of your library system. Don't trust what the Wikipedia page itself says - especially if the topic is at all controversial.

slothman

May 25 2010, 21:37:02 UTC 7 years ago

I see Wikipedia as a heavily annotated index rather than an actual source. (Rather like The Cartoon History of the Universe and The Cartoon History of the Modern World; I would never cite them as a reference, but they’re a great place to get overviews that will lead you to useful keywords and references.)

May 25 2010, 21:40:16 UTC 7 years ago

I got hooked on research when playing Ars Magica, a role-playing game set in medieval Europe as people thought it was at the time— right down to Aristotelian physics. Medieval bestiaries are the canonical Monster Manual for that game, and there are some wonderfully weird things if you go digging into the Greek and Roman classics; Pliny the Elder’s Natural History gets a lot weirder than TSR ever did.

The fun part for me is when I load up enough things into my brain that they start connecting up of their own accord.

aineotter

May 25 2010, 21:56:01 UTC 7 years ago

Aah! I love your icon. It combines two things I love, and so many viruses really do look like D20s! Well...I mean, and the spiky ball bits could sort of be coronavirus.

May 25 2010, 22:02:30 UTC 7 years ago

Thank you!
I don't write stories, but I'm an avid consumer of them. While I *adore* good SF, the ones that get biology badly wrong make me cringe.

I suspect you've got great sources for virology, but if you ever need another, or have questions relating to vet medicine, pathology, immunology, or animal infectious disease info I'm totally willing.

May 26 2010, 15:20:16 UTC 7 years ago

Oh, wonderful. Thank you!

xnbach

May 25 2010, 22:50:04 UTC 7 years ago

Great article.

It reminds me of something Christopher Moore said when he was talking about writing Fluke, and that is the fact that experts also loving talking to people about their area of expertise. This came up for me in my WiP when I was writing dialog for some of the deity characters. Since the deities in question were thousands of years old, I figured their native language would be Proto-Indo-European. I wrote it out as best I could, but then realized that the words were probably right but the grammar was completely wrong.

So I found the contact information for a professor of archaic languages specializing in PIE and he said he'd go through those bits for me. It was only after he said yes that it damned on me that half the dialog I needed occured during a sex scene. Still, I got what I needed and the maqn was extremely nice about teh whole thing.

Also, I can now talk dirty in a recontructed six thousand year-old language.

hasufin

May 26 2010, 15:11:02 UTC 7 years ago

I confess, it had never occurred to me that anyone had reconstructed grammar on PIE.

May 26 2010, 16:01:43 UTC 7 years ago

Research is sometimes the best part.

vincentursus

May 26 2010, 00:25:31 UTC 7 years ago

My first thought was 'Practical Research' for Feed would give you and a bunch of friends an excuse to lurch around pretending to be zombies.

Then I remembered that you don't need an excuse.

May 26 2010, 16:01:52 UTC 7 years ago

This is true.

asphaltangel

May 26 2010, 01:09:03 UTC 7 years ago

Oh man, Seanan, this needs to be shown to all of my darling ninth graders whose characters inevitably end up sounding like north country teenagers no matter who they're supposed to be (I teach 'em social studies, but their English teacher would LOVE THIS).

May 26 2010, 16:02:17 UTC 7 years ago

Yeah, that's a common teenage thing. I did it, too.

groblek

May 26 2010, 02:10:46 UTC 7 years ago

As someone who's had an otherwise good book ruined by the author screwing up basic genetics, let me say a big Thank You to you (and other authors who bother) for researching topics that you write about. I haven't actually read your works yet (just got a call from the local bookstore that they came in, actually), but everything I've heard and read here tells me that I won't have to worry about getting jarred out of the story that way.

Also, this makes me think of my advice to the friends in school who wondered how to get a professor to know them well enough to be willing to write letters of recommendation - ask them about their research. Most professors love to talk to someone with a sincere interest in their specialty, as long as you're polite about it.

May 26 2010, 16:02:35 UTC 7 years ago

Very welcome, and very true! (In re: the professors.)

May 26 2010, 13:37:33 UTC 7 years ago

ruined by the author screwing up basic genetic

Thank you!

And getting nurses completely wrong. Different areas of hospitals require nurses with different skills. A nurse who works the OB floor isn't necessarily going to have the knowledge or the skill to work in surgery or NICU.

Stuff like that aggravates me because I grew up in a family of nurses. A lot of women in my family were / are nurses of some stripe, flavor, or color. And I was a CNA for a number of years, myself.

May 26 2010, 16:12:24 UTC 7 years ago

Understandable aggravation.

May 26 2010, 13:40:32 UTC 7 years ago

I had an issue over the weekend which prompted my husband to say, "Just leave it. Nobody will notice. And if anybody does, you can just smile." Right. Sure. Somebody somewhere always notices the least little nit-picky thing.

May 26 2010, 16:12:32 UTC 7 years ago

So true.

valdary

May 26 2010, 15:38:42 UTC 7 years ago

My Mom is very fond of a particular thriller writer, but after he wrote a story in which a computer virus was causing computer screens to shatter I could never believe in his writing.

May 26 2010, 16:12:40 UTC 7 years ago

...

GLEH.

jongibbs

May 26 2010, 22:26:44 UTC 7 years ago

Excellent! I've found people to be most helpful when I ask them to share their expertize.

June 7 2010, 15:50:15 UTC 7 years ago

They like it!

taraljc

June 1 2010, 22:06:46 UTC 7 years ago

I like primary sources. A LOT. I also like bibliographies. Every time I find a good book on a subject I am researching, I go hunt down the books they cited.

Granted, this is coming from someone with an entire bookcase of Gosford Park research. A lot of other people are not quite so insane as me. I mean, some are. But I think I take it to a level that scares some of my friends and family. I read about 15 books on life in service and country houses between Victorian and post-WWII England, and every single extant Ivor Novello biography, AND a fabulous Welsh play about his time in Wormwood Scrubs prison for abusing petrol coupons. That's perhaps going a tiny bit overboard for a single Yuletide story. And yet I have learnt SO MUCH from that two month research binge.

But what I love about research is how it takes me to places and stories I wouldn't have found on my own. The story of Joe Desh and the NCR Bombe, as well as the Romany King buried in Dayton? I found that doing research on Navy WAVEs for a Wonder Woman story. Trufax. That also led to my insane love of the OSS, and the WWII Deception Units.

What I love is that, when a friend of mine needed stats on average leaving age for a boy living on a housing estate in a specific part of Britain, I pulled a book off the shelf and emailed him the relevant info.

June 7 2010, 15:50:30 UTC 7 years ago

Primary sources are better than kittens.

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Thoughts on Writing #43: Research Is Love.

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