researching
11 days in to my 365 writing challenge and so far so good.
The frequency of returning to the page keeps the novel on my mind, which means even when I’m not physically writing, I’m working through things up top, considering plot structures/developments and characters to try in the next writing session. I found this technique worked really well with my last long piece of fiction; being constantly poised and ready to write.
Predictably, my novel is progressing along a series of sharp bends and u-turns. I started the year with 2 very solid ideas for a novel, and for better or worse, both have developed simultaneously, but in completely unexpected directions. I wonder how long you can keep up 2 novels side by side…
This week I find myself researching present day Iraq as the opening of one novel quickly revealed itself to be a set piece located around the American invasion of Baghdad, and in particular, the initial ‘shock and awe’ campaign that Bush promised Hussein.
Am I interested in Iraq? I wasn’t up until a few days ago.
I recently listened to a podcast (Barnes and Noble Meet the Author – a free Podcast available through iTunes) of a reading by Nick Cave of his excellent and perverse new book The Death of Bunny Munro. During the interview/reading a reader asked Cave why he was so fascinated by the role of the traveling salesman; a thankless job belonging to the main character of the book.
Interestingly Cave answered that he wasn’t at all interested in traveling salesman before writing the book, nor did he necessarily feel intimate with some of the themes that came out of the final work. He explained that readers are often too eager to make connections between the fiction on the page and the fact of the writer. Often the two beings are very separate and the creative process very in control.
Cave went on to say that stories more often than not choose the authors. Not necessarily in a spiritual way, but in the kind of way that writers often find themselves writing in directions that feel strange and unfamiliar. Though you try your best to steer the narrative to back familiar shores, the final result is often the product of a creative act far not bound by rational notions of creative ownership.
In a similar way, I would never have imagined writing an opening set in Iraq. This of course might be a bad thing. I know nothing about Iraq. But nor do I know much about many places I have or haven’t been. That is the beauty of fiction I guess. I’m not trying to replicate the real, I’m appropriating various aspects of it to scratch a creative itch.
In order to scratch itches I have no physical experience of, I turn to research. I find one of the best ways to get a feel for a place, if you can’t travel there physically, is to jump on to Flickr and see some amateur photographs of an area. Many of the photographers on Flickr aren’t going to win Pulitzers any time soon, but the ordinary photos of streets and people can sometimes be far more useful to a writer than a choreographed shot. Ordinary photos contain detail that may be irrelevant to a photo journalist, as they are trying to capture a feeling, whilst the writer is often trying to just position themselves in an unfamiliar place.
The realist genre suggests there are certain procedures that a writer can go through to give an impression of the real in writing. I will never try to recreate Baghdad from the ground up. Instead I hunt the internet for blogs and images that might reveal small details of a place that will ultimately help suspend disbelief for a reader.
For example, I read on the famous Salam Pax blog (for those who haven’t heard the name, Salam Pax is the ‘Baghdad blogger’ – look him up) that even years after the invasion formally ended, night in Bagdad is announced by a chorus of overworked generators switching on as these are used by many homes as their sole source of electricity.
This is what I would call an ‘authentic detail’ – something that readers can latch on to and instantly be rewarded with a sense. So the line in my novel became “…the thin wail of overworked generators pushing through the house…”
Hemingway’s sparse but visually orgiastic prose worked because he realised that authenticity had nothing to do with size. Instead of collecting and presenting every detail of a place to give a feel of authenticity, he selected a few precise details and let them carry the weight so the story could continue uninterrupted.
As a result, most of his novels are shy of 200 pages and yet deal with some of the most complex human affairs (civil war, life and death). Old Man and the Sea is 127 pages.
Too much detail and the suspension of disbelief is broken. The passage starts to feel like an abstract pulled from an encyclopedia. This kind of thing is fine for non-fiction, but not fiction. A story only works for as long as the reader can forget that they are reading a story at all. Once the edges of the page become clear, a story is revealed as a piece of paper full of lies. I find it amazing how many writer’s seem to forget this and bulk up chapters with town planner like precision, effectively dumping the reader in a different book for a few pages.
Less is almost always, more.
I’ve lost the train of my original post. Research! That’s right. So that’s how I do my research. I plow through books, blogs and photos trying to find those few authentic details that make a place real for me, so I can make it real for the reader. So how do you do your research?
