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What is Solace?: Comfort or consolation in a time of great distress or sadness.
Even so, what does Solace mean?: If you're sad, you might find solace in music or in talking to your friends. It is no surprise that consola...
According to the Oxford Dictionary online, harvesting refers not just to gathering crops, but also collecting a resource for future use. Therefore, I want to talk about relating to both back to school and harvesting research.
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In this letter, I want to explore the importance of research for your stories and why it’s essential to be accurate.
1. You owe your readers an accurate portrayal of the topic you write.
2. Your readers will pick up what’s right and what’s false.
3. You’ll be proud of yourself for doing the research. And if you get it wrong, that’s a good lesson to be better at what you do.
1. You owe your readers an accurate portrayal of the topic you write. This is something I learned when I studied journalism. I later became a newspaper reporter, and every story I wrote, from feature articles to court reports, needed to be accurate, honest, and fair for both the readers and my sources, including the communities my articles represented. This applies to every story I write as an author, fiction, or nonfiction alike. As writers, it doesn't hurt to use the same ethics as the Australian Journalists' Code of Ethics (or similar ethics guide):
● Honesty
● Fairness
● Independence and
● Respect for the rights of others.
We can be proud of the work and achievements we put in when we do our research to make sure our readers get the correct information. If readers are given the wrong information, we’re misinforming them. As writers, we need a social moral conscience, and we owe it to our readers to be informed appropriately.
An example I'll use is when I wrote about my main character Sapphire's gluten allergy (coeliac disease) in Lessons on Seduction. I attended a course and read a lot of material on the allergy, as I have a close family member who has coeliac disease. My character’s eating habits needed to be consistent. All her meals were gluten-free, and her partner checked with the restaurant to make sure she had wheat-free meals when he took her out on a date. The ingredients he used to cook her meals were gluten-free too. Consistency throughout the story was important to support my research.
2. Your readers will pick up what’s right and what’s false. If you write about a topic you aren't sure about, make sure to do your homework. As writers, we are both creative and resourceful; creativity can go hand in hand with resourcefulness. There are reliable resources on the internet, and outside the web that we can read, listen, or watch on a topic we write about.
