Research

An Element of Fiction

Verisimilitude is one of those sixty-four-dollar words that for all its pomposity is actually nuts-and-bolts important to any writer.

I guess more colloquial synonyms would be authenticity, credibility, realism, a ring of truth, and so on. My point is that even if you only write fiction and no word other than, even if you make everything up: you overlook research at your own peril.

A crude example: say you’re writing a story set in Australia and your protagonist is driving down the highway toward Perth in his 1968 Mustang, top-down; now he first signals and then swings out to his left to overtake a four-trailer truck train ahead of him. I promise you that you will lose any reader who knows that Australia deploys left-hand traffic. You may get everything else right, but those who catch you out on this one point will put the book down and (since bad news travel ten times faster than does the good variety, I heard somewhere) tell his friends that this one writer doesn’t know his what from his what.

Philip Gerard puts it succinctly, “Don’t cheat. You will always regret it later. Always. No exceptions.”

If in any doubt at all — Google it for heaven’s sake. Research, today, is a hundred times easier and faster than in those historic pre-Web days; then it was a trip to the library, or — if you could afford and/or find one — a large paper encyclopedia with a good index (I had two of those); or a lot of travel.

A personal case in point: Living in Los Angeles at that time, one evening I’m writing about a summer’s midnight in a northern Swedish forest, and I just about put the sound of chirping crickets in there (they were certainly chirping outside my LA window). Luckily, I caught myself and then tried to remember: what did a forest summer midnight in northern Sweden sound like? I couldn’t for the life of me tell for certain. And Google was still not even a glint in Google Daddy’s eyes.

So, the next time I went to Sweden (not too long thereafter — it was summer), one midnight I made a point of driving out into the forest to listen. And what did I hear? Cuckoo birds. That’s what. Other birds too, but mainly the cuckoo.

I brought the cuckoo back to LA and to my story.

Gerard, who has a lot to say about research, goes on to say, “Research encompasses everything the writer does, accidentally or deliberately, randomly or systematically, to put him in direct touch with his subject.

“If you’re going after big ideas, universal themes, you have to know — really know — what you’re writing about. The best books of this type — nonfiction and fiction — are firmly grounded in research.”

Samuel Johnson, an eighteenth-century linguistic giant, chimes in (in agreement) from days gone by, “The greatest part of a writer’s time is spent reading in order to write. A man will turn over half a library in order to write.”

George Sand sheds her light on this: “In order to get on with my novel I need to see a part of the region that hasn’t already been dealt with by everyone else, and where there are real local people in their own surroundings: peasants, fishermen, a genuine village among the rocks… I’d like to see their faces, their clothes, their houses, and the landscapes they live in. That’s enough for my purposes… I don’t really mean to describe things; I just need to see them, so as not to get the lighting wrong.” (My emphasis). Then she adds, tongue in cheek, “The sort of research that grocers call useless.”

Ernest Hemingway agrees, “Whatever success I have had has been through writing what I know about. Knowledge is what makes the underwater part of the iceberg.”

Then Hemingway adds an amazing statement, “If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them.” (My emphasis).

Pithy Gerard again: “You research it any way you have to in order to know — really know — its truth.”

Then he adds a caveat, “The Internet… can only take you so far. It’s a great well of information, bogus as well as reliable, but it is no substitute for the real thing, for being there, for the thing itself. The great books seem to be earned, not always through physical danger, but through a deep experience with the subject. And some courage to put yourself on the line.”

I think we need to take this warning to heart. Today’s Web is replete with opinions masquerading as facts and as deliberate lies impersonating truth. We cannot even trust news stations anymore — gone are the Walter Cronkite days of “And that’s the way it is.” And we could trust and take his word for that.

If in doubt, go there yourself: swim that river, scale that mountain, experience it for yourself — then you’ll KNOW and your writing will sing.

© Wolfstuff

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