Rapturous Research

by Sheila Connolly

Recently I read an op-ed piece in the New York Times written by Sean Pidgeon, a writer as well as a reference publisher for John Wiley & Sons.  Given his day job, it should be no surprise that he is much invested in literary research, but he was surprised to find that it had a formal name:  research rapture.  He did some online digging and formulated this definition:

…the delightful but dangerous condition of becoming repeatedly sidetracked in following intriguing threads of information, or constantly searching for one more elusive fact.

Sound familiar, writers? Pidgeon was talking primarily about writers of historical fiction, but I'm convinced it applies to any fiction, or at least to those writers of fiction who have a fondness for facts rather than pure invention.  I'm one of them.  Yes, I confess:  I am a research addict.

The Internet makes it far too easy—all those links, like breadcrumbs forming a trail to that one perfect fact that you really, really need for your work in progress. 

I'm still in the midst of writing the second book in my County Cork Mysteries. In it there's a murder at a manor (I swear I wrote the original version of this long before Downton Abbey premiered).  I'm writing about a real town, and I've seen the local manor—from the outside.  Now, this is not historical fiction, nor do I have to stick to "only the facts" about the place.  I don't expect to see the interior; I could, but currently it's a Catholic retreat house, and I daresay the interior in its current state would not fit well with my story.

It has not been difficult to find the history of the family that owned the place when they first enter into my story, in which the last descendant is still living there (not true in reality:  the last descendant died in 1983), going back to the 17^th century.  This I derived from multiple websites, starting with that of the retreat house, and then wandering through sites that discuss Irish social history and others focused on architecture.

One of the most intriguing and relevant tidbits came from the Census of 1901 (also available online), which shows the details of the house that year.  For example, this was clearly the Big House of that townland:  where most residences in that townland had two windows in the front (a basis for valuation in those days), the Manor House had 17.  Where the other houses had mainly between six and 11 rooms, the Manor House had 25.

Equally interesting are the individuals listed in the Big House as of the census date.  There were three family members living there in 1901:  the widowed mother (the nominal Head of House) and her son and daughter, both unmarried.  All three belonged to the Church of Ireland (Protestant).  This family of three was attended by four staff:  a cook, a housemaid, a parlor maid, and a kitchen maid; all were Catholic. The cook and the kitchen maid spoke both Irish and English.  There was also a "Visitor" below stairs—a retired nurse from America. So there you have the sociological make-up of a family that belonged to "the gentry" of the day.  And that's the snapshot I needed for my book.

I went off on other tangents, of course.  For example:

--laws pertaining to ownership and registration of firearms in Ireland (strict)

--European Union regulations for establishments serving food (lots of forms to fill out)

--Laws pertaining to serving alcohol

--The number of surviving nunneries in County Cork (more than you might think).

Many of these diversion may result in no more than a line or two in the finished book—something like, "What about opening a restaurant?" "Forget it—too much paperwork." Others lead to questions that can best be directed to human beings rather than the Internet—things like, "how strict are you really about opening and closing hours?" (I asked—there's a lot of flexibility.)

Can readers tell if we can back up those throwaway comments with fact, or if we're just making it up as we go?

Research: Gone Fishing

Elizabeth Zelvin

I’ve spent the summer writing the first draft of my mystery set in the Hamptons, not among the rich and famous but among my series protagonist’s housemates in a group house “north of the highway” in an imaginary Hampton located between Amagansett and Napeague on the way to Montauk. I’ve already blogged about what fun I had researching a scene set in a pick-your-own strawberry field back in June. As the plot and characters came into focus, I decided it would be fun to send Bruce and his sidekick Barbara out fishing and set my denouement on the boat. So I wrote my way right up to the scene on the water and made a date with my across-the-street neighbor Bob to go fishing.

Bob is a retiree whose joy in life is to take his boat out on Gardiner’s Bay for bluefish. His wife Pat has long since stopped going along. She neither cleans, cooks, nor eats blues, having had more than her share many years ago. But she graciously accepts Bob’s passion. Bob is in it for the sport, so unless a friend or neighbor requests some fresh caught fish filets, he tussles with the bluefish, striped bass, and sometimes albacore tuna—all game fish that give him a good fight, he told me—lands them, and throws them back. The day before he took me out, he took in 30 blues in about three hours. Of course, he admitted to me that since nobody sees his catch, there’s nothing to stop him saying he was landing four and five pounders when they were really only a pound or two and claiming that the one that got away weighed a hefty ten or even fourteen pounds.

Bob picked me up in his red Jeep Cherokee in time to catch the ebbing tide.

“I hope you haven’t used up all your fishing karma for the week,” I said.

More likely, he assured me, fish yesterday meant fish today. Besides, he’s a veteran who’s been fishing these waters since he was a boy and knows the bay so well he hardly glanced at the screen of his fancy GPS as we pulled out of the marina. In fact, he didn’t “watch the road” or use his hands to steer at all. I didn’t know whether to be alarmed or impressed.

My agenda was to get answers to a long list of questions so I could “get it right” in the scene in my manuscript, absorb the experience, and, if possible, bring home fresh fish for dinner. Two minutes from shore, before Bob had finished showing me how to cast, he hooked and let me land our first bluefish. It seemed to augur well for the day.

“Do you want to keep it?” Bob asked.

“We’d better,” I said, “just in case it’s the only one.”

For the next four hours, it looked as if I may have jinxed us with those words. This is not to say I wasn’t having a marvelous time. It was a gorgeous day, and even though for some mysterious reason, we couldn’t find the usual schools of bait fish churning up the water, with flocks of birds above and schools of bluefish below competing for the chance to dine off them, it was great to be on the water. Bob said it was the worst fishing day he’d had in years. It wasn’t just us, either—ordinarily, where the birds and fish gather, so do a cluster of fishing boats. No boats, no birds, no fish. So I took notes on the boat and the fishing process and got a close look at Gardiner’s Island, Plum Island, and a ruined fort. I learned to cast well enough to stop hooking parts of the boat every time I tried. And Bob told stories.

Since I can’t work the best story into my manuscript, I’m free to tell here how Mr. Gardiner blew the whistle on Captain Kidd. In the 17th century, the first Gardiner in the American colonies bought about half of Long Island from the local Indians for practically nothing. The family got very rich, and the present-day heir still owns Gardiner’s Island, the largest privately held island in the United States. Captain Kidd was hanged for piracy in 1701, although there’s still debate over whether he was just a privateer. So it must have been right at the turn of the century that Gardiner and his son came upon Kidd and his crew burying treasure on Gardiner’s Island.

“I damn you, and I damn your family!” Captain Kidd said, according to my neighbor, Bob, threatening to come back and murder the son if either of them breathed a word about the treasure. Gardiner, not intimidated, notified the authorities, and Captain Kidd was captured, brought back to England for trial, and hanged. The Gardiners later boasted that they dined off solid gold plates that had been part of the pirate’s hoard.

We kept looking for the elusive blues. Finally, after we had given up and just before we reached Hog Creek, the inlet leading to our local community’s marina, we finally spotted a flock of terns wheeling and diving into a patch of churning water. Out came the fishing rods, and I’m glad to report that I came happily home with two or three nights’ dinner.

Research Librarians are the Superheroes of the Computer Age

by Julia Buckley
My favorite librarians: Molly Klowden and Sue Tindall.

There's always a time, even when one is writing fiction, that research becomes a necessity. I've had to research things for all of my literate life, and I consider myself relatively capable. But just as the folks in cartoons sometimes need to call on the help of Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman or some other caped crusader, so too do I need to occasionally call my own favorite superhero: the research librarian.

Why do I love them? Let me count the ways.

1. They are always cheerful. I assume that this is because they genuinely love learning and the acquisition of new information; that's why they went into the library game in the first place.

2. Nothing is too weird or obscure. I have asked questions about DNA, inheritance law, incest, conflict of interest, the history of Chicago, forgotten politicians--the list will go on forever (as I keep adding to it). But those wonderful researchers hop right on. Sometimes they say, "Hmmm! That's an interesting question. Let me look into it and I'll call you back."

3. They always call back. And when they do, they have information. Sometimes they'll even mail, fax or e-mail it to me, which is ultra convenient. Why do more people not take advantage of this service? Here are these wonderful people, smart, savvy, with books at the ready, willing to save us from our own ignorance. And it's never been easier.

4. They answer e-mails. Too lazy to use the phone? Research librarians have e-mail addresses, and all of the ones I've worked with will respond to queries sent via e-mail. Computers are changing the world in many ways--generally good ways. The fact that I literally have information help at my fingertips is, to me, something akin to a miracle.

5. They are everywhere! I have utilized the help of reference librarians at my local library, Chicago libraries, my university library, and the library at the school where I teach (see librarians above!) All of them have been quick to help and clever in the extreme.

6. They get it right. Research librarians are painstaking in their research, which is why they often want to call back. They won't toss you an off-the-cuff answer, but will do the proper thing: check and double check, comparing one source against another. In other words, they do what I should do but don't always have the time to do.

There are many more reasons why these librarians are my heroes, and I suppose the biggest one is that THEY SEE THE WISDOM IN SPENDING THEIR TIME IN A ROOM FULL OF BOOKS.

Three cheers for research librarians!

Doing Research

Elizabeth Zelvin

I’ve never been fond of doing research. I majored in English back in college because it meant I got to read novels. Decades later, when I went back to school for a master’s in social work, I always felt slightly over my head in the university library. The Internet made things easier. When I don’t know something, I google it. But the systematic hunt for facts still scares me. I’d much rather make it up.

As a mystery writer, I’ve learned that there are things I’m allowed to make up and things I’m not. It seems unfair that writers for television are apparently allowed to get everything wrong, while novelists get scolded via email by their readers for the smallest error in fact. But who said life was fair? I can—in fact, I must—make up my characters and the situations I put them in. I may make up the settings of my stories, if I choose. But forensics, police procedure, and any kind of technical detail had better be accurate.

I didn’t know this when I wrote the first draft of Death Will Get You Sober. But when I started sending the manuscript out and networking with other mystery writers and readers, I soon learned that I couldn’t afford to ignore this stuff. To some extent, I could bypass it. I chose as my setting a milieu I know well: the world of alcoholism treatment programs and recovery from addictions and codependency. As a professional, I had published in the field. I didn’t need to look much up, and writing quirky characters and snappy dialogue instead of clinical prose was fun. I also chose to make my protagonist an amateur sleuth. My recovering alcoholic and his two sidekicks get suspicious about a death that’s fallen through the cracks in the system and make their own investigation. The convention of the traditional whodunit—mine is too gritty to be called a cozy—allowed me to do this. If I’d tried to write a police procedural, a PI novel, or a technothriller, I’d have had to research it. So I didn’t.

The police crept into the next two manuscripts, Death Will Improve Your Relationship and Death Will Help You Leave Him, which will appear in due course provided the first book does well. I contrived to keep them more or less in the background. But now I’m working on the fourth, Death Will Extend Your Vacation, and the moment of truth has arrived. My amateur detectives take shares in a group house in the Hamptons and find a body on the beach. The problem is not so much a case of Cabot Cove Syndrome (How can Jessica Fletcher manage to find so many bodies in one small town?) as that there’s no way the group can go on with its summer without police involvement. One of their housemates is dead. Sure, my protagonist and his buddies can snoop. But trying to get the story going, I quickly found myself stuck. I needed to know what the police were doing. Hence: research.

So one morning I waltzed into the headquarters of the Town of East Hampton Police Department, introduced myself as a mystery writer, and said the magic words (courtesy of writer Robin Hathaway), “I want to get it right.” As she’d predicted, they were glad to help. In minutes, I was seated across the desk from a handsome young sergeant with a gold shield pinned to his blue uniform.

“How do I know you are who you say you are?” he asked.

“Here’s my card,” I said. “And my bookmark.” (Better than a passport, with my picture and bio on one side and my book title and blurb on the other.) I showed him the Malice Domestic pad I’d brought along to take notes. I also mentioned my former affiliation with POPPA as a clinician doing outreach to NYPD officers on the subject of post-traumatic stress.

“It’s set in an imaginary Hampton,” I began.

He grinned and gestured at the room around him.

“This is it,” he said. I can imagine that policing in the Hamptons must be stranger than fiction some of the time.

I proceeded to describe my scenario and ask what the police would be doing at every point along the way, especially where they would necessarily be interacting with my characters. The sergeant generously gave me an hour of his time. He not only answered all my questions, but told me a few facts I didn’t even know I didn’t know. For one thing, group houses are illegal anywhere in the Town of East Hampton (from Wainscott to Sag Harbor to Montauk). Oops. Luckily, it’ll be the landlord, not the renters, who get in trouble when the murder bring the house to the law’s attention. Best of all, in explaining why the police and the medical examiner must be called to the scene of any death, the sergeant uttered one line so good that I absolutely must use it in the book.

“It’s against the law to die in the State of New York.”

The Devil's in the Details

Suzanne Adair (Guest blogger)

Recently, I taught a workshop on researching historical fiction. The workshop provided attendees with tools to conduct primary and secondary research and generate plenty of information. But I cautioned everyone that historical fiction is a tough sell. "The devil's in the details," say agents, editors, and publishers.

Authors often succumb to the temptation to load down their historical manuscripts with minutiae, just to ensure that readers "get" the settings. They also pride themselves on delivering novels with perfect details. The biggest mistake historical authors can make is focusing on all those details. What's the priority of a historical novelist? To spin an enthralling tale. In other words, subordinate facts to the creation of riveting drama and compelling characters. Here's why.

History is a fluid field. Every now and then, a researcher reveals results of years of study -- a new conclusion disproving an old. Such a revelation can collapse the fictional world established by a historical author if the author has relied upon precise facts to carry the book. A novel that lacks riveting drama and compelling characters is thereby reduced to a mess of not-so-accurate details. Excellent story and characterizations propel readers through a novel, hurtle them over any potential speed bumps caused by obsolete details. When a reader says of a historical, "I couldn't put it down!" it means the plot and characters elevated the story past the details, entertained the reader, and made the novel greater than the sum of its parts.


If you're writing a historical, resist the urge to use details for a coup. Instead, keep in mind the basic tools of good writing. Employ details in a supportive capacity only. Let your story flow from your knowledge of what makes a good plot, characters, setting, etc. Whatever your genre -- speculative fiction, western, crime fiction, romance -- you cannot go wrong with riveting drama and compelling characters.

Suzanne Adair (http://www.suzanneadair.com/) is the author of Paper Woman, released October 2006, the first novel of a historical suspense series set during the Revolutionary War in the South. Paper Woman is the recipient of the 2007 Patrick D. Smith Literature award, presented by the Florida Historical Society (http://www.florida-historical-soc.org/). The second novel in Adair's series, The Blacksmith's Daughter, is scheduled for a fall 2007 release.

Tied Up in Research

Darlene Ryan (Guest Blogger)

I hate research. I don't mean the kind that involves curling up with a stack of books for the afternoon. I mean the kind of research that involves me doing something. That kind of research never quite works out for me. A couple of weeks ago I was trying to solve an ongoing problem with my WIP. I had my main character tied to a chair. Would she be able to throw herself sideways? Could she do it without hitting her head? There was no way I could figure out the problem on paper. That meant.... (gag, gag) research.

"Honey, could you tie me up later?” I asked my husband.

"What will you be wearing?" Mr. Romantic asked with a leer. "Will there be whipped cream involved?"

Men.

I went out to the shed to look for rope. There was none. There were more bicycles than we have people in the house, as well as four rakes—which is very strange because there are never any rakes when it’s time to gather up the leaves every fall. Then I remembered, when I'd moved a chair for my mom I'd had to tie the trunk up with a plastic skipping rope, because we had nothing else.

So where was all the rope? There had been a length of white nylon rope hanging up by the snow scoop. Then I remembered I’d kind of set that on fire. (For future reference, it's not a good idea to try to melt the end of a fraying piece of rope if it may have been at one time tied to the handle of a gas can.)

We’d had some yellow rope. Where was that? Oh right, that had ended up all unraveled when I cut a piece to tie to the sled because I wasn't going to try that melt the end of the rope with a match trick again. No sirree.

At one time we did actually have some “real” rope. Hemp. Cotton. Sisal. I didn't know what it had been made of. It was the kind of rope you use to practice tying knots when you’re learning about sailing, when what you’d really rather be doing is planning how you’re going to sail to the Bahamas, live on the boat and write a best-seller a year. Oh yeah. I'd used that rope to tie up a couple of boxes of books before the school yard sale last year--with perfect reef knots, by the way.

Okay, so I couldn't get tied up until I got some rope. It was off to the big-box hardware store. At the hardware store there was an entire aisle of rope and chain, all on big cardboard and metal rolls. A nice young man with a pierced lower lip was happy to cut me a length. What did I want? And how much?

What did I want? I wanted rope. Who knew there were so many kinds of rope? I looked up and down the aisle as though I were contemplating my options.

"What do you need the rope for?" Pierced-lip asked.

You see, this is why I hate research. I can’t tell Pierced-lip that I need rope because I'm planning on getting my husband to tie me up. Oh, no. First of all, I'm old enough to be Pierced-lip’s mother. Yes, I know I don’t want rope for some kind of kinky middle-aged sex thing. But he doesn’t know that. And second of all, I learned the perils of giving away too much information the time I was looking for a new toilet in the same store. When the sales guy asked me what kind of toilet I was looking for I blurted, "The one with the biggest hole." (It's not that funny. At the time I had a four-year-old who used half a roll of paper with every bathroom visit. Each flush was an adventure. And by the way plunging is great for firming up that pesky little underarm flap that keeps on waving even after you've stopped.)

So I said, "I want to tie up a rug."

"You shouldn't tie a rug with rope," he told me. "You could damage the pile, ma'am."

Great. I have to get the only keener in the entire store. However, using my quick writer-ly thinking, I said, "It's a really old rug."

"It could be an antique, ma'am," he said. "You definitely shouldn't tie that with a rope."

"No, no," I insisted. “It's only an old rug I need to get rid of. I just want to roll it up and tie it on my car."

"You have roof racks?” he asked.

Roof racks? I just wanted some rope. Why were we talking about roof racks? "No,” I said.

"You know you shouldn’t just tie things to the roof of your car," he said. "It's not really safe. And I think it's against the law anyway."

By that point all I wanted to do was tie one end of a piece of rope to that lip ring and the other to the bumper of my car and drive away very fast. I had a headache that felt like someone had just driven a spike through my left eye. “Never mind," I said, heading for the door.

"Roof racks are in aisle 14," he called after me.

When I got home, Mr. Romantic was in the kitchen practicing knots with the tie backs from the kitchen curtains. "Is the guy in your book a sailor?" he called after me as I headed down the basement stairs. "Because I think he should be." I just kept on going.

I hate research.

Darlene Ryan is the author of the novel Saving Grace and the hilarious Rules for Life.