Should You Research Your Fiction? No!

Posted by Guest Writer in Writing Help

Sep
19

by William Saunders

I know novelists who if they plan to have a scene set on a fishing boat will arrange to spend a day on one to garner authentic detail. This is not a good idea.

It could be said that my opinion is that of a spoiled brat. For many years I was a journalist for big city newspapers who wore an Access All Areas pass in all kinds of interesting places. So am I, with a memory bank and notebooks full of authentic detail, giving you the old “write what you know” refrain, and suggesting you set your first novel in a creative writing class? No. I’m saying authentic detail doesn’t help fiction all that much.

Apart from anything else, research is never as exciting as the idea seems. Once you are on board the fishing boat you will be in everyone’s way, which is dispiriting. Consider too that you are not the first writer to think of researching your fiction. People who work in environments where there is lots of interesting authentic detail to be garnered, forensics labs or emergency rooms, say, have grown weary of such requests, as the standard letter of refusal they send out will hint. There are unexpected hazards too. When a now established Scottish crime writer dreamed up his first fictional murder, he decided to drop by his local police station to get some advice on police procedure. Unfortunately for him, his imaginary crime was similar to a real local murder which was as yet unsolved, and he was held for several hours as a suspect. At least he garnered some authentic detail.

A ride on a fishing boat is easy to arrange, and here the problems of research begin to assert themselves. You will return from your adventure with a bulging set of field notes and the temptation to share them with your reader will be irresistible. You will want to describe every creak and shudder of the winch–and how dull it will be. In the general run of things you don’t explain what electricity is before a character walks into a room and turns on the light to reveal a dead body, do you? And your instincts are correct here, but there is nothing like a pile of authentic detail to lure you away from them.

Worse still is the temptation to dispense your authentic detail in little nuggets, to round out the character, you tell yourself, but really to show off how much you know. Your main character is an architect and when he or she glimpses a mysterious stranger across a crowded room, the way the stranger stands reminds him or her of some esoteric piece of architecture. Architects do not think like that because nobody does. I am a writer, but no stranger, mysterious or otherwise, has ever reminded me of a punctuation mark. Furthermore there is nothing like the little nugget, carelessly applied, to expose your ignorance of the subject to an actual expert.

The real difficulty research creates is far profounder than these irritations. Fiction is a collaborative process between reader and writer. When you ride on the fishing boat you will find it is very different from how you imagined it would be; that was the whole point of the expedition. When you try to recapture the actual reality in words you will cease to be a co-dreamer and become a lecturer, and your story will no longer be a story, but information. Try as the reader will to be interested, the bond between you is broken and whatever magic you had together is lost.

William Saunders is a British poet, journalist and author. His latest publication is Leah And Her Twelve Brothers. He blogs here.

4 Comments to “Should You Research Your Fiction? No!”

September 19, 2012 at 11:20 pm
Laura Roberts says:

Here here! There’s nothing worse than an autodidact who wants to prove he’s the smartest man in the room. (This also applies to women, doubly so.)

Although I think his approach to writing is primarily bullshit, given that he aims to be the “McDonalds of literature,” John Locke (the 21st century bestselling author, not the 17th century Father of Classical Liberalism) has said that whenever he comes to a bit of info he ought to know while writing, he simply writes “TK” and keeps moving. In other words, don’t waste time researching; just write your story, and when you come to the end of the creative process, go back and look up all the bits you weren’t sure about to make yourself look smart. Great advice! And it works for me.

Honestly, I think writers tend to get bogged down in the geekery of writing, when they could go far more in the opposite direction and still get away with a lot. Why specify the type of gun when your reader can fill it in with their imagination?

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September 20, 2012 at 6:13 am
Bobbi Frels says:

Agreed!

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September 20, 2012 at 1:50 pm
David Duhr says:

A few comments from other places:

“Can’t say I really agree. I think experience is key to great writing. There are the rare writers who can create fabulous worlds in a vacuum, but a well rounded life makes for the best fiction”

“If you want to write non-fiction, then by all means go do a ton of research and write non-fiction. But the beauty of writing fiction is found in the act of unleashing your mind and discovering new territories. A life of experience helps, but in the end we are engineers of imagination. Let it fly free.”

“There’s a lot to be said for not putting too many details in your fiction, but not researching is not the answer. Entire novels have been ruined for me when a writer made up some detail. You don’t have to force in details, but if you dont research and you mess something up because of (lets be honest) laziness, I don’t want to read your writing.”

“What if you love research? And isn’t it a great time waster? I mean who doesn’t get lost in Google? Some research is important – keeps the anachronisms at a minimum.”

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October 25, 2012 at 11:22 pm
Ron Seybold says:

Hard to say how much researching helps a good story. Maybe just winging it is good enough for Kindle-only novels which then go unreviewed. Indeed, making things up — after the genuine labor of journalism — has got to feel liberating. And if we’re not writing just to make ourselves happy, and damn the readers, what’s the point of doing it?

I think you know the point. To tell a story well. To include details that make it authentic. To do the work of taking that thicket of field notes and finding the one that will make the scene sing. Now that you’ve retired the All Access Pass, maybe there’s a reason to give the reader the equivalent with good research. Not go-nuts level. But maybe the kind of gun makes a difference to the story.

On the other hand, if this piece is just sardonic humor, well, never mind.

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