The “research” conundrum…
Authors often speak about doing “research” for a book. From the science and technology point of view, that’s a misuse of the word “research,” but I’m seeing that incorrect use increasing with the years. Kids writing a report for school “research” it; they mean they’ll google a bunch of stuff and write about it (or just copy). People wanting to find what to do about insect bites will “research” that. You used to go the library and use the reference books for all this; the internet and search engines changed everything. It still isn’t research.
There’s no creative invention when you’re finding information for use in your book. There’s no R in the sense of R&D; there’s not even any D! You might say, “Eureka,” when you find a tidbit of arcane information you can use in your story, but it’s just background material. Let’s call this process “fact gathering.” While you might be a botanical expert on killer plants, anyone can just google that—I wouldn’t recommend that you do true and original research by trying potions made from those plants on yourself! So, the first writing question of the day is: how much fact gathering should you do?
I generally do some before I even start writing a story. As it proceeds, I might find I need to do some more. In mystery/suspense/thriller novels, I usually focus on two or more important themes that have social implications. That requires fact gathering. Settings can require it to. One can write stories in these genres without any fact gathering, but I can’t. I’m sure there are readers who would just prefer to bury their heads in the sand when it comes to society’s problems, or not care where the characters are—they shouldn’t read my stories!
Probably one thing that distinguishes fantasy from sci-fi (at least, hard sci-fi) is that the latter not only requires a lot of fact gathering but also reasonable extrapolation. Every scientist knows extrapolation is dangerous. Not so much in sci-fi. If you get it wrong in your book, lives won’t hang in the balance and millions of dollars of equipment won’t be damaged. If Perkin-Elmer makes errors in grinding a telescope mirror (they did this with Hubble), it’s a big deal. If you screw up with your description of the process, some readers might heap verbal abuse on you, but that’s the only consequence.
I screwed up at one point in More than Human: The Mensa Contagion—it was related to my description of the Mars expedition’s hardware. The first reader who finds it gets a free ebook (Kindle only) chosen from my catalog of books. Hint: Andy Weir made the same mistake in The Martian. (I don’t know if I should take comfort in the fact that I have famous company.) I had the facts. (He probably did too.) I just didn’t use them consistently. (Maybe that will get me a movie contract?)
Many novels need fact gathering. You’re probably better off having too much information. I said that I often find I need more as I go. That’s a wee bit inefficient, but you can’t always guess how much info you need, so more is better. I often discuss the most pertinent stuff in my “Notes, Disclaimers, and Acknowledgments” section at the end of most of my books, but I usually list just some of it. I often have a lot more and rarely use everything. So, the second writing question of the day is: how much of this wonderful background material should you use?
Speaking of Weir, he obviously used a lot in The Martian. At the end of the second version I bought (where’s the first?), he describes how he calculated scenarios until he realized maybe all that could go into a story. (OK. Maybe that was creative, but he was using well-known techniques. It might qualify as D; certainly not R.) Besides Moby Dick (see my review last week), I was also reminded of another famous sci-fi novel, Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues under the Sea, but in a bad way. Verne bored me with his verbose description of undersea flora and fauna; Weir bored me with the daily description of all the tricks his character used to survive on Mars. Take away all those facts (everyone he gathered?) and you might be able to see the good story lurking underneath (you’d probably have to eliminate what little NASA internal politics there were too). I guess a lot of people were able to read through all that techno-babble and see the story. I believe there was too much of it.
You all know I champion the Goldilocks Principle and minimalist writing. The first means your story has to have a balance of elements appropriate to your genre, not too much of anything, just enough. The second is that you should let the reader participate in the creative process. You don’t need to describe your MC down to the mole on her/his left butt-cheek, for example, unless it’s important for your plot; give some hints and let the reader form their own image of the character.
Those principles apply well to answering how much of your fact-gathering to include. Weir screwed up and sinned against poor Goldilocks. So did Verne. Yep, they wrote good stories, but the sin is still there. Asimov and Heinlein (ex-scientists) never did that. I’ll posit a sanity check for any author with a mountain of gathered facts: if you take all those facts away, do you still have a story? Is it a better one? We often love our words so much that we’re loathe to eliminate them; the same thing can happen with all those facts we’ve gathered. Follow the Goldilocks Principle and be a minimalist writer—you can’t go wrong.
Note that, as I said in my mini-review of Weir’s book last week, I’m happy for Andy Weir’s success with The Martian. It’s always encouraging when a book becomes a blockbuster success. But it would be nice to figure out what made it a success. I can’t. The first publication, 2011, was before all the Mars fever. The references I used in More than Human: The Mensa Contagion were 2013 and later, many occurring when the fever was highest. Maybe that just means Weir was prescient and guessed that such a book would be received well. If so, congrats to him. He hit the jackpot. Goldilocks won’t give him a hug, though.
But back to the main topic: do your fact gathering as needed and do it well. Your background material can make your novel come alive in many ways, providing historical and scientific context as well as real-world venues. Don’t overload the poor reader, though. Anything that helps your reader relate to your story is a plus. That’s why you need fact gathering. Sometimes just one fact you’ve gathered can make the difference. Zillions will make a reader’s eyes glaze over, though. I’m an avid reader. I know that’s true in what I read.
In elibris libertas….
