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:
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.
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).
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:
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:
Balancing the expected and commonplace with the surprising and unique creates the verisimilitude that perfects the illusion of truth.
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.
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.
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.
Research is like author time travel. You pause writing for just a sec while you look up the average weight of an American black bear. Suddenly, it’s an hour later, and you’re reading the Wikipedia page on P.T. Barnum.
—Bill Ferris
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.
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.
3See Searching the Heart: Women, Men, and Romantic Love in Nineteenth-Century America, 1989, Oxford University Press.