Novel Writer's Toolkit: Revised Edition

Research: The Story's World and Get the Details You'll Need

Writing historical fiction, I’d better have my dates correct.  And the historical characters in the right place at the right time doing the thing they did.  However, no one knows what these people really said in most cases, unless it was specifically recorded, such as Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.

If you are writing a mystery you can't be too far off base with your police procedural information, although the focus should be on character, not technique.  One of the most successful detective series of all-time, Inspector Morse, didn’t rely on forensics or car chases, but rather on the human interaction among the characters.  

I think many people are lulled by the inaccuracies portrayed in movies.  Books have to be more accurate for several reasons; one is that the average reader is more on the ball than the average moviegoer; second, you can slide something by in a couple of seconds of film but the reader can linger over and reread a paragraph again and again.  A reader can also turn back from page 320 to check page 45 where you mentioned the same thing and compare the two.

The Internet

The Internet is useful in gathering information as there is a web page about practically everything.  I had a scene in one of my Area 51 books where a character is attacked by piranha while crossing a river in South America.  Having personally never been attacked by piranha, I searched the web and found several pages devoted to the creatures.

Another strength of the Internet is networking.  There is every possible organization out there with a web site and then there are places like Facebook and Twitter.  I’m not getting into those in detail, because there are other books out there for that.  

The Internet is a useful way to get in contact with other writers and even agents and editors.  I maintain a web site of my own through which people can e-mail me.  Be warned though:  you should spend the majority of the time on your computer writing, not surfing.  I am a firm believer in turning off my wireless while I write.  It’s off right now.

Old Fashioned Books

Also, I still use books a lot for research.  While the Internet can get your specific information it also has flaws.  First, you have to have an idea what you’re looking for.  Second, the Internet often doesn’t give you interesting details you can only find in a book.  Third, the Internet sometimes can’t give you a ‘feel’ for a topic.  Reading U.S. Grant’s Memoirs and then several biographies about him gave me insight into his character I could have never gotten from finding facts on the Internet. 

Some Examples Where Research Using A Book Adds To Story

1. I was writing a book titled Area 51 The Sphinx.  Therefore I did a lot of research on the Great Sphinx.  In a thick tome I was wading my way through there was one sentence that caught my attention.  It said that Sir Richard Francis Burton, a man who’d always fascinated me, visited the Great Sphinx in 1855.  The opening scene of the novel ended up being this visit.  Then, as I researched Burton, I learned that upon his death, his wife burned a manuscript over his body.  A large part of the book became a chase in the present day to discover a copy of the manuscript and decrypt the secrets it contained.

2. Years ago, I was wandering the library and saw a book titled:  Japan’s Secret War.  I picked it up and was quite intrigued at the author’s premise that the Japanese actually developed a working atomic bomb and detonated it in Manchuria in the waning days of World War II.  As a fiction writer, this was a premise I could run with and I took it one step further:  what if there were a second bomb, and it was taken by submarine to San Francisco at the end of the war and left at the base of the Golden Gate bridge?  I ended up with Black Ops: The Gate.

3. I was researching Vikings because one of my Atlantis books has half the storyline set in the year 1,000 AD.  In one book I read about an interesting character named Corpse-Loddin, whose career was to sail out in the spring and recover the bodies of Vikings who were trapped the previous winter by ice and killed.  He would boil the bodies down, strap them to the side of his boat and sail back home to sell the bodies to their families for proper burial.  I found him such a bizarre character that I knew he had to be in my story.