The Confabulator Cafe

Tag: research

  • Strange New Directions: The Importance of Research

    If fiction is the doorway to new and exciting worlds, then research is the door frame. No one ever notices it. They concentrate on the brass handle, the polished hinges, and the flawless paint, such a deep midnight blue that you expect to see constellations of stars bursting from the glossy surface. No one notices the door frame, but it supports the whole thing. It allows the doorway to exist.

    The simplest research is never noticed, unless you get it wrong. Small details that may not seem important can damage the illusion of reality. I read a book recently where a character slept with a gun under her pillow, specifically a Glock, with her finger “curled” around the trigger and the safety on. This was an important prop interaction because it showed severe contrast and character change from when compared to a similar bedtime scene early on in the story. There is just one problem. There aren’t any external safeties on a Glock. The slightest jerk in her sleep and the girl would have blown her brains all over her Aunt’s comforter set. (more…)

  • Books Are for Boring People, Not Ten Year Olds

    I’ve done research. I’ve spent hours in a library, flipping through books so dusty I couldn’t stop sneezing for weeks after touching them. I’ve gotten lost in the stacks of my University library, fearfully glancing over my shoulder every few seconds. The flickering lights and echoing silence of the building can’t help but make me feel like I’m trapped on the set of a horror film.

    I’ve done research. I’m familiar with what it takes. But that’s for writing boring papers. That sort of research is what you do when you have to worry about being factually correct.

    It isn’t the type of research that you do when you’re ten years old and you and your best friend decide you’re going to write a novel. (more…)

  • When I Do Research, I Try to Have Fun

    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.

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  • The More Things Change

    I once got to spend a year reading 100-year old newspapers. Things haven’t changed as much as you think they have.

    Sure, now we’ve got the Internet and cable television and pictures of the Earth from the Moon, but as far as human nature goes, not to mention the things considered “newsworthy,” we’re pretty much the same as we ever have been.

    Stupid wars are the same— the justifications for getting into the Spanish American War sound an awful lot like the justifications for invading Iraq. They had patent medicine ads— we have weight loss tips. As far as celebrity gossip goes, only the names have changed. Political partisanship was just as rancorous— the other party’s candidate was always a lying cur and untrustworthy jackanape. If you had more than one paper in town, one would be the Democratic paper, the other the Republican one, and they’d have flame wars like you wouldn’t believe. Sensationalism sold, especially in crime stories— a ghastly murder on the other side of the country was always going to get published.

    A surprising amount of the news back then was very local. On a typical day there would be an announcement that Miss So-and-so has returned from visiting her aunt in Chicago. I always wondered how that got in there— did the newspapers employ roving gossip-teers to fill those column inches, or did Miss So-and-so visit the newspaper office herself to tell them? Was this the early 20th century equivalent of a Facebook update? Was the entire town on her friends list? Sometimes the newspaper would reprint parts of letters sent home from those who were traveling abroad, describing their adventures; a form of early blogging. I remember seeing ads placed by manufactured gas companies, saying that if enough households in town pledged to become customers, they would build a gas plant and bring modern heat and lighting to town— Kickstarter for the analog era. A major factory might have a daily or weekly column devoted to it, describing how good their business was and telling stories about the workers, announcing hiring or layoffs as appropriate. And you know how Facebook likes to sneak ads into your newsfeed? Newspapers would do the same, publish ads that looked like news until you read it closely.

    Things changed during WWI, though. The war news, the national news, began to crowd out the local news. The Associated Press and other news services had been around for fifty years, but now the invention of the teletype put news items into local newsrooms in almost real time. Soon there was usually only one newspaper per town, often only one per county. You couldn’t become a newspaperman by buying a secondhand press and a barrel of ink anymore. The local gossip stayed around for quite a while (you can sometimes still find it in rural small-town weeklies), but by the 1950s, the papers were more “professional,” more worldly, and much more staid. Syndicated columns by “experts” replaced locally sourced, seat of your pants content. In the 1970s and 1980s, there was almost no local content at all.

    Today hometown newspapers are going back to their roots and finding stories in the communities where they live. They’re also writing in a folksier, less polished voice. In an era where everybody knows what’s happening around the world in real time, the local stuff is what is unique and interesting again.

  • In Search Of…

    Art by Sean Phillips from surebeatsworking.blogspot.com
    Art by Sean Phillips from surebeatsworking.blogspot.com

    Investigations are part and parcel of being a creative person especially a fiction writer. Something triggers a thought and that leads to one thing, which leads to another and likely to another.

    But what’s the trigger? A piece of conversation. A throwaway line of dialogue in a film. A song lyric. The way a sunbeam falls across a picture in the living room. The way a bird is perched in a tree. The snake that’s ready to steal the bird’s eggs.

    Any of these can lead me down an investigatory path.

    Like Sara, I love to learn and keep on learning. Like her I have learned to read and appreciate reading for information. I can’t read as much non-fiction as she does (One a month? That’s waaaay beyond me.) but I do read a couple of magazines that get delivered to the house, usually from cover to cover. I’m reading more fiction than ever before, though, and reading a wider range of genres (including literary fiction) more than ever before, too. (more…)

  • I Can Do it All (in theory)

    Today I am supposed to talk about the most interesting research I’ve ever done for a story.

    One of my favorite things to do in life is to learn. I’d be a student forever if I never had to take tests (or pay tuition). I love to read to absorb knowledge and learn. This tendency has become more acute the older I get. I now read as many non-fiction books as I do fiction. The ratio went from never reading anything just for the sake of information, to maybe one or two a year, to maybe one a month, and now, I’m always reading one fiction book and one non-fiction book. Every other book I read is for information.

    Sometimes the facts I read about spring into story ideas. Sometimes it’s the other way around. Sometimes I end up using a writing project as an excuse to research something interesting.

    It’s a “chicken or the egg” type situation. It works both ways.

    (more…)

  • Literature and History

    It was just a few years ago that I was writing non-fiction every month for school. Throughout my college experience, I was enrolled in several high-level English classes which often required study and commentary on works of literature. One of my favorite assignments was the analytical research paper.

    I enjoy arguing and a research paper is arguing in a controlled format. You make a point, and back it up with facts, anticipating criticism and opening debates. As an English student, I took a lot of literature classes, and my best arguments were on the writings of the English Renaissance.

    Shakespeare, Spenser, and Marlowe were (and are) my favorite, along with a healthy appreciation for other noteworthy works like the King James Version of the Holy Bible or the plays of Ben Johnson. For some people, these are nearly in another language, nearly incomprehensible. I find that with a little bit of study, what looks nearly incomprehensible becomes beautiful, expressive verse that cannot be matched by anything else.
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  • An Assembly of Greys

    Sometimes, I wonder if there is such a thing as non-fiction.

    A professor of creative writing at Iowa State used to tell the story of a non-fiction class she taught. She had a student whose insane life kept her captivated throughout the semester. He was the son of a single mother and a man who had worked for the mafia in Chicago. His father had disgraced the family and spent a majority of his son’s childhood in prison. The subsequent shame haunted him and his writing detailed the life of a young man trying to climb out of his father’s dark shadows. His stories haunted the professor.

    A couple of semesters later, the student’s girlfriend enrolled in the class. The professor pulled her aside one day and asked how the student was doing. The girlfriend was confused and informed the professor that his dad was a farmer and his parents were still married. Later, going over the former student’s writing, she found an essay he had written at the end of the class. It said “true or not, all stories come out fiction in the end.” (more…)

  • What’s Wrong With Asking the Crowd?

    When I was in library school, about half an Internet generation ago [0], we were warned, very specifically and repeatedly, against relying on Google or Wikipedia or any other online resource authored by “non-authoritarian” sources. Instead, we were directed toward proprietary academic and professional databases— EDGAR, Dialog, Lexus/Nexus, Westlaw, and the like.

    I chalked up a great deal of this propagandizing to existential angst amongst an older generation of library professionals. The unwashed public having direct access to raw information without the kindly and professional intermediation provided by suitably indoctrinated gatekeepers? Quel horreur! [1]

    I had been an IT professional for about 10 years by then [2] and had nothing but the deepest respect for the free-form conversation that is the Internet [3]. Sure, plenty of the information you find may be wrong, but if so, somebody else will be along shortly shouting at the top of their CAPS LOCK key precisely how wrong it is, with illustrative asides and digressions into the quality of the original poster’s intelligence, reading comprehension, research methodology, and parentage, including hyperlinked footnotes to, for example, the website of the guy who invented whatever the heck you’re talking about. If you have a high tolerance for alpha-geek posturing, the Internet can give you one hell of an education.

    (more…)