For many years, I didn’t write fiction that required a lot of research… on purpose. I wrote either short stories or fan fiction, and focused more on the characters and the situations than writing the sort of stories that needed research.
I did the generic sort of stuff — checking Wikipedia for setting information, reading that one sex site everyone recommends for fan fiction writers — but until I started writing Real Adult Novels with Actual Stuff in them, I didn’t do a whole lot of factual research.
I still haven’t done a ton. My NaNo’ing has left me in the habit of leaving notes and saving the research for stage two. I’ve only gotten one novel through that stage. There was a lot of boring research on diabetes and stuff. (I even called a medical professional friend!)
However. There are a few memorable moments.
What Must the NSA Think?!
I got stuck while deciding how the characters in a scene would be smoking opium. I’ve seen pot in action, but opium? Who still smokes opium? (Answer: lots of people.) Was opium even the right drug for this scene? It’s the future! Maybe they have FutureOpium!
I ended up sticking with opium, but there were a lot of little details I wanted to snag, so that a character walking in the room would recognize it pretty quickly. I found details on what the high would be like, and what the room would smell like, et cetera.
Yeah. I got a lot of hookah ads after that, and started doing the rest of my drug research in a porn “Incognito” window.
Slighty Crazy!
I wrote a story that was supposed to take place in eleven minutes. (I assure you it has a very clever title.) Since it was primarily dialogue-based — until the car crash — I sat in my room and timed the dialogue, trying to be careful of character cadence and emotion.
Alone.
I’m so glad I had my own bedroom by then. My poor sister.
The Most Fun! And Frustrating!
When I was working on the fantasy story last summer, I got really caught up in trying to time the journey in the first book. This bothered me — because I know that I can’t do math, that I have no internal sense of scale, and I had been winging the setting from a map I made using some economic information from GURPS: Low Tech… while I was drinking. There was no scale. Have I mentioned yet there was no sense of scale?!
I had concluded that the river the party had to walk up and along was roughly the economic equivalent of the Mississippi River back in ye olde day. (And now? See, I don’t know this shit.) So, I made Google Maps spit out the distance between St. Louis and New Orleans, using the walking instructions.
I then spent a long, frustrated evening searching for the average speed of steamboats (and then, but what about when they’re going upstream?) and average walking speed. Then I tried to figure out how to translate miles-per-hour into something useful for the distance I had my characters travelling.
Finally — utterly convinced that my math was wrong because I can’t math — I threw it all into Paint and came out with this:
It’s probably flawed. (It’s most definitely flawed.) BUT. Having that information allowed me to continue forward with the story and stop obsessing with the journey logistics. I was able to get through the rest of the journey without too much panic.
Until, you know, I later decided that it was all wrong. As you do.
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