“Researching a Novel…or Just the Facts, Ma’am”

Nobody writes a novel without doing some kind of research.  It can be detailed and extensive or barebones, but if you want to be taken seriously, you’d better get your facts straight.

Currently I’m into researching, planning and outlining for my next sf novel The Farpool: Marauders of Seome.  I’ve got electronic and real folders for character bios and backgrounds, book covers, Earth circa 22^nd century, Uman-Coethi conflict and U-boat details, plus a variety of additional files and notes.  At this moment, I’m developing background and bios for major characters ( but not all of them). 

The great question for any storyteller or novelist is how much research is enough?  How much detail is enough?  There is a term—verisimilitude—that writers sometimes use. It means ‘resemblance to the truth.’  No storyteller tells a story with all possible details.  He’d be writing or reciting an encyclopedia instead of a story.  The storyteller chooses details selectively to enhance the story and give it a flavor of being real.  You should include just enough detail to transport your reader into your imaginary world and ground him there, believing that all this could in fact have happened.

Which means that you do enough research to provide enough detail to achieve verisimilitude.  In practical terms, that means you have to do a bit more research than you ultimately might use.  As an author, writing about how a character feels or might react to a situation, I want to be able to pick and choose details to explain, illustrate or dramatize the situation in such a way as to put the reader right there in the character’s shoes.  Little details can matter, especially if a reader has some experience with the subject matter.  When I wrote The Farpool, I used the term valsalva maneuver to describe something that scuba divers do to clear their ears and sinuses when experiencing pressure changes.  The concept was relevant to the story and I had to use it accurately to maintain verisimilitude.  I had to research it to know what I was talking about.  And I’m sure some of my readers are well familiar with this technique and would have bitten their lips in anguish or firebombed my house if I had used the term incorrectly.  I should add that I’ve never scuba dived a day in my life. 

Ernest Hemingway once said all writers should have a built-in bullshit detector.  Why?  Because all readers have a built-in bullshit detector.  What about science fiction stories, where the writer is taking us to worlds and times and alien cultures that have never existed anywhere outside the writer’s imagination?  Here again, the details have to read true, sound true and feel true.  And they have to be internally consistent.  Often, the littlest detail—what someone ate for dinner last night, how they dressed for descending into that cave, what it felt like when they landed on the icy surface of Europa—if done right, can connect with the reader in just the right way and they’ll find themselves saying: “Yeah…I can believe it would happen like that!”

Author Tom Young, writer of many well-regarded military thrillers, writes in Writer’s Digest some tips to follow when researching a story:

1. Write what you know (personal experience has a value all its own)
2. You can do research on the cheap (that’s why we have Wikipedia and libraries)
3. You can find anything on YouTube
4. You can find things anywhere.  Keep pen and notepad nearby during all walking hours.
5. Use all your senses
6. You can leave things out.
    
   I particularly like Young’s advice about number 7 above.  To quote:
    
   “If you do thorough research, you’ll find more material than you need, and no reader likes a data dump. In my own writing, I could bore you to death with the details of aircraft and weapons. But a very good creative writing professor once advised me to let the reader “overhear” the tech talk. Say, if my character punches off a HARM missile that might sound authentic and pretty scary. But scary would turn to dull if I stopped the action to tell you that HARM stands for High-Speed Anti-Radiation Missile, which homes in on anti-aircraft missile radars. Who cares? The damn thing goes boom.”
    
   In other words, a little bit of detail can go a long way if it’s chosen properly and used correctly. But it’s still necessary.  You still have to do the research to dig out that little nugget and save it for the right moment in the story.
    
   Researching is ultimately about being prepared, ready to write the story with the flair and power that will grab the reader and pull them into your imaginary world and strand them there for the duration.  The best stories, the most memorable stories, have memorable characters and memorable settings and details. 
    
   Anyone remember the monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey?
    
   The next post to The Word Shed will come on April 3, 2017.
    
   See you then.
    
   Phil B.