Mining for Diamonds

Strike It Rich with Research—Without Getting Buried Alive

David Corbett

Before becoming a novelist, I worked as a private investigator. My job required, among other things, that I knock on lots of doors and ask lots of questions of lots of strangers. Not all the people I approached reacted cheerfully. I was often yelled at, routinely cursed, frequently threatened, and once almost run over. (The man who tried to kill me, ironically, was a doctor.)

My job taught me the three key elements of any successful attempt to gather facts, and they’ve served me well in my fiction:

1. Prepare and organize. Begin by developing a fundamental understanding of what you believe you need to learn. This means knowing enough about your basic story and its world, specifically the era and locale of its events and the action you foresee taking place, to have a working idea of the kinds of information and areas of inquiry you lack.
2. Remain open to the unexpected. Once the research begins, keep an open mind (and eye and ear), taking note of unexpected revelations. Make sure the assumptions made during your initial preparation don’t blind you to discoveries that lead in unforeseen and potentially valuable areas, even if they fundamentally change key elements of the story.
3. Reassess, adapt, and follow up. Remain flexible yet disciplined. Always ask new questions shaped by what you’ve learned, to the point of rethinking the whole enterprise, without losing sight of the core inspiration that excited you in the beginning. This is a continual back-and-forth process of assimilation, reevaluation, and discrimination.

As you can imagine, these three guidelines are easier to state than to follow. But if you exhibit self-control and abide by them wisely, they really can help you know when you’re straying into the fascinating but unnecessary.

CONSIDER THE ROLE OF FACT IN FICTION

The first question to answer in determining what to research isn’t what, but why. Consider for a moment this quote from Albert Camus: “Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth.” Dozens of great authors, from Ralph Waldo Emerson to Doris Lessing, have expressed similar notions. Which raises the question: If fiction is lying, why bother with facts at all? The answer lies in recognizing that, like magicians, storytellers create illusion. Though the purpose may indeed be to reveal a deeper truth, the fact remains that the focus of our effort is to convincingly deceive.

Research serves this purpose. Through credible detail, we establish a fictive world that convinces the reader it’s worth her while to suspend disbelief and invest emotionally in our tale. The purpose of research, then, is to establish authority, not veracity. It’s like misdirection in a magic act. By focusing my reader’s gaze on this (the details I’ve supplied), I draw her attention away from that (the material I’m obliged to invent).

KNOW WHEN TO STEP AWAY

The peril of research lies in not recognizing its limited purpose and instead pursuing more information than necessary because it’s just so darn fascinating. This is why so many novelists confess that the problem with research isn’t digging in, it’s digging out.

Worse, after so much investment, they feel obliged to shoehorn all the neat stuff they’ve learned into the book. Nothing stops a story in its tracks as effectively as a wall of needless information.

Research need not become an ever-descending mine shaft from which only the lucky return. All you need is enough information and detail to convince the reader you know your business. The degree of effort necessary to accomplish that end will depend on the sophistication of your audience. (Note: One should never underestimate the intelligence of readers.)

As a general rule of thumb, I try to nail down fundamental details that tell me how life is lived at the time and place of my story. That includes (but by no means is limited to) the following:

• Climate: including standard precautions against the elements, from flood levees to parasols
• Clothing: from necessities to ornamentation, with an eye for the varieties of style within a given social or economic class and between classes.
• Manner of speech: with, again, an ear for variety (letters and newspaper accounts, if available, are invaluable—especially for historical settings—as is the simple act of listening if your story takes place in the present)
• Work: such as who does what and why (this will dovetail with era and geography) and the physical details of that work, the wages, and the dangers
• Class, race, sex, and power arrangements: such as who feels free, who feels constrained or oppressed, who manages the money, who raises the children, how quickly the children reach adult status, who has leisure time, who inherits property, who cares for the sick, and who goes to war
• Architecture: specifically the nature of the homes (and households) of the powerful, the powerless, and those in between
• Food, music, entertainment: the things that make daily life “lively”

You can see at a glance how this kind of research can easily get out of hand. Understanding your specific story needs permits you to exert some control. And yet wandering off in the dark for a bit may avail unforeseeable gems that automatically enhance your authority as storyteller, such as:

• the inviting honey color of certain varieties of whale oil used in lamps (as opposed to colorless kerosene, which replaced it)
• the class-tinged tension in the Old South between Methodism (“deeds not creeds”) and Presbyterianism (which claimed salvation was predetermined and virtuous acts were irrelevant)
• the ethereal interpretation given to consumption (tuberculosis) before its contagious nature was discovered, especially among writers and poets such as Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Emily Brontë (it supposedly “purified the patient and edified her friends”)1Sheila M. Rothman, Living in the Shadow of Death: Tuberculosis and the Social Experience of Illness in American History (New York: Basic, 1994), page 16; as quoted in Gary L. Roberts, Doc Holliday: The Life and Legend (John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2006), page 60.

Balancing the expected and commonplace with the surprising and unique creates the verisimilitude that perfects the illusion of truth.

DEFINE THE EDGES AND THE SHAPE OF THE UNIVERSE

The British novelist Tom Rob Smith follows what he calls a “four-month rule.” He permits himself sixteen weeks of unlimited but intensely focused research before even considering putting fingers to keyboard in service of story. To make the best use of that time, he also narrows his research to “best sources.” To the greatest extent possible, he tries not to get caught up in scholarly debates that will require him to investigate everything from two (or more) opposing perspectives. For example, in researching Child 44, though there were sources on the Soviet Union that viewed the Stalin regime favorably, even triumphantly, he early on decided that this didn’t serve his purposes and he didn’t waste time reading them.

Similarly, if you find in your research that scholarship has gone through stages of revisionism, you’ll most likely want to use the latest sources available. For example, during the mid-1970s, research into nineteenth-century correspondence between women friends (and lovers) led many scholars to believe that women developed deep interpersonal bonds at least in part because their connections to brothers and fathers were emotionally wanting, to the point that it seemed as though men and women existed in mutually exclusive spheres.2See, for example, Carroll Smith-Rosenberg’s seminal study, “The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations Between Women in Nineteenth-Century America,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 1975, Vol. 1, No. 1. But then Karen Lystra, a professor of American studies at Cal State University, discovered a treasure trove of correspondence between husbands and wives from this same period, archived at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California. These letters revealed profound intimacy between married couples, with spouses who often considered each other their closest, most trusted companion.3See Searching the Heart: Women, Men, and Romantic Love in Nineteenth-Century America, 1989, Oxford University Press.

The point is that knowledge, even of the past, isn’t fixed. It’s constantly evolving due to new discoveries and fresh interpretations. Not only that, contemporary records are often wildly at odds. Newspapers from the 1800s often provide irreconcilable views of events due to the highly factional nature of reportage at the time. It may be true that newspapers are indeed “the first draft of history,” but this only underscores the necessity of further revision and correction.

There’s also a creative way to address this fluidity of fact. The irreconcilable views of married life or Stalin’s regime certainly represent a challenge in your research. You can choose one faction or the other to believe, or you can use these antagonistic opinions to provide conflict within your story. Tom Rob Smith may not have wasted time poring over pro-Stalin texts, but he understood the need to ground the Stalinist functionaries within his novel in the truth as they saw it.

However you establish the preliminary boundaries for your research, the need to keep an open mind about unforeseen discoveries remains one of the key elements of the work. These discoveries will not only provide details of daily life and animate conflicting perspectives, but they will also generate ideas for scenes and characters you did not anticipate at the outset. But this open-mindedness cannot be open-ended. Something like Tom Rob Smith’s four-month rule is valuable because it forces you to begin writing.

Sometimes the time to stop researching and start writing is obvious—for example, when you realize you’re encountering the same basic information, with only minor differences, over and over. That indicates you’ve learned enough. Now write. Another endpoint often comes when you gain a solid sense of what isn’t or can’t be known—authorities and sources are silent on a particular issue or fact. These omissions in the official record can actually open avenues of creative speculation and invention, which are natural starting points for stories.

But even if you don’t encounter either of these natural transitional junctures—or set a time limit, or create some other cutoff—at some point you need to turn away from the research and toward the blank page. That said, nothing obligates you to curtail all research. In fact, you can continue to read and explore as you write your story—as long as the compulsion to learn doesn’t dominate the need to meet your daily word count, become an inquisitive tic, or cause a block. You can always update details and scenes as you go along. Writing is rewriting. But you can’t revise what you haven’t written.

BEWARE OF FUSSING OVER THE FUSSY

Certain areas of expertise attract a devout, rabid, even unbalanced following. One ventures into the Civil War, for example, at some risk, since it forms such an area of intense obsession for many buffs and armchair experts. If writing within the framework of such a jealously guarded arena, it’s sometimes best to read the best-available survey text or general history in order to avoid obvious errors, and then focus on some smaller, singularly focused, even idiosyncratic source for a more unique view on events.

In researching his brilliant novel City of Thieves—in which two prisoners face execution if they can’t find a dozen eggs for a wedding cake—David Benioff relied not only on Harrison Salisbury’s The 900 Days, the most authoritative text in English on the siege of Leningrad, but also acknowledged his debt to Curzio Malaparte’s Kaputt, a “work of strange genius” that provided “a completely different perspective.”

Even thoughtful precautions can prove fruitless, however. The crime writer G.M. Ford no longer refers to any weapon in a book as anything other than a “gun” because he wearied of the letters from handgun enthusiasts who insisted the sidearm he’d mentioned couldn’t perform as described. “And never, never put a Harley-Davidson in a book,” he added.

It’s not just weapons and machinery that inspire such fierce reactions. A knowledgeable reader—a bookseller, no less—once confided to me that she stopped reading Dennis Lehane’s Mystic River when a woman character used hot water to rid her husband’s clothes of blood. “Any woman knows you use cold water,” she said, admitting she put the book down at that point because the author “lost her.” Fortunately, he didn’t lose millions of others.

Worrying over such nitpicking is pointless. Do your best to get it right by using the most reliable sources you can: knowledgeable people you can interview (see below), official documents and newspapers from the period and locale of the story, classic and canonical texts, biographies, letters, and, of course, the increasingly inescapable, if not always reliable, Internet. Then take the blame for all errors in your acknowledgments, and let go.

INTERVIEW AND OBSERVE

Earlier I mentioned my occasional encounters with hostility when trying to get people to talk to me as a private investigator—small surprise, given the fiercely contentious nature of the issues at stake. In general, however, I enjoyed the exact opposite reaction. If approached in a spirit of humility, respect, and curiosity, people tend to be very generous. We all like talking about what we know.

Often it’s best to approach interview subjects with self-enforced parameters: “I have five quick questions.” Once you sit down together, the information may flow freely, but take care to respect the interviewee’s time. Do your homework, and separate the essential from the merely interesting.

Novelist Donna Levin wanted to visit the San Francisco coroner’s office for a book she was writing, but she felt too shy to go alone. Knowing I was a PI (at the time), she asked if I’d come along. Her anxiety proved groundless. The staff member we met gave her a tour of the whole morgue and sat with her for several hours. This underscores a point I made at the beginning: It doesn’t take bravado or cockiness to knock on a stranger’s door—quite the contrary. Donna won over her interview subject with her thoughtfulness, intelligence, and self-effacing humor.

Experts also often lead to other experts with better, more precise information. For my novel set in El Salvador, Blood of Paradise, in which water rights were a key component of the story, I interviewed a hydrologist who had worked in-country. He introduced me, in turn, to another specialist who’d worked specifically on the issue of groundwater drawdown and well depletion in the region where my story took place. This gentleman also provided maps and reports of incredible value, along with anecdotes about battling the Kafkaesque local bureaucracy. His information not only gave me a bounty of great details; it also convinced me my original story idea wouldn’t work. This meant a lot of rewriting, but it also spared me the embarrassment of getting it all wrong.

I traveled to El Salvador twice and employed guides from both an ecotourism company and a surfing outfit. They drove me around the country, identifying the prominent flora, fauna, beaches, and churches. We discussed local history, culture, and cuisine, and they even gave me pointers on caliche (Salvadoran slang). But the real find was Claire Marshall, a BBC reporter I met by chance on the beach at La Libertad. She introduced me to Carlos Vasquez, a deported former shot caller for Mara Salvatrucha in Los Angeles, now running an outreach group to help other gang members leave the life. We shared coffee in the Zona Rosa in the capital, and his insights on the maras, from both inside and outside perspectives, proved golden.

Such investments of time and money are not available to everyone—or necessary. The Internet, despite its faults, is a great source for preliminary information and can often direct you to people, documents, texts—and, most important, images—that can help you visualize and flesh out your story world. It’s great to visit the locale of your book if possible, but take a cue from historical novelists: You can’t visit medieval Ireland or ancient China or any other land in the past. Story worlds are conceived in the imagination and portrayed in words. Fortunately, both lie near at hand.

The same is true of in-person interviews—they’re wonderful if possible, but phone or even e-mail contact is not only acceptable but often preferred for its less intrusive nature. Persistence may be required to get a response, but remember you’re searching for diamonds—if they were easy to come by, they wouldn’t be so valuable.