[april 2024] research for writing, part I: types of information
or: 4 ways to approach researching for fiction. also there is a picture of my face.
an interesting thing happened this month: i fell down a rabbit hole of JFK assassination conspiracy theories. if you’d asked me last month what year Kennedy was assassinated, i could’ve only guessed. now, i would say, “he was assassinated on November 22, 1963, in Dallas, Texas, and was pronounced dead at one p.m. Lyndon B. Johnson was sworn in at 1:38 p.m. in the cabin of Air Force One. Lee Harvey Oswald was apprehended but shot just days later by nightclub owner Jack Ruby—” and so on.
all i needed to know about the JFK assassination was enough to write a single paragraph about how my character, who was born in 1951 so he’s 12 years old, would’ve heard the news. i didn’t even really need to know how he felt about it, because i’m writing that particular chapter in third person omniscient—really distant, moving through a lot of time very quickly. i ended up with knowledge (and rampant speculation) about history that affects every single plot thread and element of my story. research is like a hydra in that way. go to wikipedia to get the rough details of something and you end up reading John F. Kennedy’s autopsy report on a tuesday afternoon. and then the actively, continuously expanding context of why that autopsy report has been made available to the public (tl;dr it’s because of Oliver Stone’s 1991 film JFK starring Kevin Costner, which prompted the creation of the JFK Records Act), and the theorizing about how much of it is bullshit.
i never intended to write research-based fiction. i’ve never seen myself as someone who has the patience for it. i have a poor memory and the severe anxiety of a girlhood know-it-all who develops significant existential despair when she realizes she doesn’t actually know anything, and that whole time she thought she knew things was because she was so self-conscious about not knowing things.
it’s the same anxiety i have about writing fanfic in a canon universe. it doesn’t matter how much i know about star wars, it is an undeniable truth of the universe that someone will go into my comments and tell me i’m wrong about star wars. the better i get at certain things—writing, editing, teaching—the more knowledge about them i acquire, the more confident i become that i don’t know jackshit about anything else.
researching for fiction writing is some of the most difficult, intense learning there is. and it’s wholly self-guided. you, of your own will and accord, have to say, “in my story, X happens, so that means i have to learn everything about it.” you have to have the internal motivation to learn something, the wisdom to teach it to yourself, and the knowledge to internalize new information such that you can render it in prose.
when you think about it like that, research-based fiction feels impossible. do you remember that episode of The Office where Dwight says he only tips people who do something he can’t do, so he tips his urologist because he can’t pulverize his own kidney stones? that’s how i feel about writers of research-based fiction.
i’m sure someone somewhere has already written a better fiction research breakdown, but i haven’t found anything beyond “write what you know” sort of arguments and beginner-level theorizing. so i wrote out the four main types of information i come across while researching, and hopefully i’ll write one or two future newsletters about other conclusions i’ve drawn and approaches i’ve tried.
but first! news and announcements.
FACE REVEAL
it’s not really a reveal because my face is on my website and many other places, but i decided to get headshots taken because i have no good pictures of myself from this decade, and every time i’m tasked with providing one, i look through my half-dozen decent selfies from when i was 27 and fall into an existential spiral.
personally i don’t think i look the way i write. i look like someone who watches tradwife tiktoks and goes to church. anyway, if you’ve never seen me before, i’d love to know if i look anything like you thought i would.
Photos by A.G. Photography
OFIC mag issue #8 is here!
Our eclectic Issue #8! In this issue, we have not one but TWO cottagecore romances, a haunted basement, a haunted church, a haunted pregnancy, vampire vengeance, a man-eating girl in a hole but with the vibes of a Broken Social Scene song, and you will learn SO much about the Book of Jonah (in a totally secular way).
synopsis review special going on through May
in my last newsletter i broke down one of my most popular services, a synopsis review, and offered a special that many of you took me up on. since my last newsletter, i’ve read a lot of synopses of great books and ideas that will become great books.
i’m continuing my special through the end of May—$75 for a review of up to 5k of a synopsis/detailed outline + a 1 hour consultation to go over my feedback. (note that the consultation doesn’t have to be in May, just the initial booking.)
writing advice roundup
i’ve FINALLY found a program that might solve my “how do i index these hundreds of asks i’ve answered over the past 10 years?” question (obsidian? maybe?). but the new question is, “when the fuck will i have time to put it together?”
until then, here are the highlights:
i think the antithesis of fear is faith. even if you’re scared to write your passion project ideas, you can have faith in yourself to stick to the things that are truly important and return to the projects you set down.
it’s the difference between an athlete and a surgeon. a person becomes an athlete for love of the sport, the act of playing. winning is important, but they wouldn’t be able to win without first finding joy in the game. a surgeon, on the other hand, probably doesn’t get into the job for the fun of operating. the fulfillment is in the operation’s success; it’s hard work with high risk. but the reward of saving or improving lives is worth it.
try writing in some other medium. instead of a word doc or whatever else, write on the back of an envelope. you’re going to throw it away anyway, so it’s no big deal if you don’t nail the voice. if it sucks, put it in the recycling with the rest of your junk mail and try something different on a different envelope, or the back of a receipt, or a paper towel. and when you reach a point where something clicks, when you’ve caught the kind of challenge that motivates you rather than discourages you, then you move back to your usual writing method.
reverse outline everything.
we try to make creativity this miserable endeavor because we think pain holds more meaning than joy. but unless someone is handing you a stack of cash to write something for them, that means your writing is internally motivated, and the key to internal motivation is pleasure. you can’t develop habits if something doesn’t feel good. and things that feel good are easy; rather, challenging in a way that’s fun, so it seems easy.
if you transcribe a couple hundred sentences that you really admire, then take the time to comb through them and pick out what’s beautiful about them, your writing will definitely improve.
when you think of the most accomplished and successful writer you’ve ever read, remember that they are, at the very core of their being, a nerd. and if you were to eat dinner with them, you would, with enough polite inquisitiveness, be able to unlock the goofy side of them that binges Property Brothers.
the trick to writing a satisfying ending [with UST] is to resolve or conclude a different and more important conflict such that the reader understands that nothing could have, or should have, happened.
there are really only two paths: the easy, long road; and the hard, fast road. on extremely rare occasion you may hit the jackpot and find an easy, fast road, but in my experience that is like winning the lottery.
every artist has two things: their medium and their subject. instead of thinking of “things you love” think of them as your subjects, in the way a painter’s subject can be nature, or a poet’s subject can be grief. unless you’re only writing for money, you have no choice but to write your subjects. even if you try not to, they’ll bleed into your work.
publishing will always be there for you. even if Penguin Random House starts pushing out AI books, real human people will also still be publishing books. and i know this because publishing is an industry full of book nerds who like reading stories by real human people, and a great many of them are writers themselves.
and it’s sad, and hard, because at one point you were much further along, but writing isn’t like riding a bike. it’s an endurance sport. and so over time you can lose that strength and skill, and you have to build it up again.
right now it seems like you’re banging on the doors of a broken elevator, when you have to take the stairs. except the stairs won’t actually take you where you want to go; they’ll take you somewhere else entirely and you just have to accept where you end up. but it’s better to take the stairs somewhere than to take the elevator nowhere.
unless you straight up take their words, the worst that will happen is that someone will be better than you or have a similar idea as you and you’ll feel bad about it. but you need to know what’s out there in order to make informed decisions in your own work, in the same way you have to do research to develop a thesis in an academic paper. just because a novel is creative writing doesn’t mean you can write in a vacuum. all creativity exists in response to existing work; your work can only ever get better by reading what else is out there.
the goal is to be able to build your pitch by saying, “x author did this successful thing, y author did this successful thing. i’m doing z thing, which has the flavor of x and y, but does this other thing that hasn’t been done yet.”
once i was on the other side of the mentor/mentee divide, when i realized i had been lifted up by writers who believed in me and my work and that i could lift others by believing in them and theirs, i started to see myself as one link in a long chain. and when you’re part of a chain, nobody can move faster than you or slower than you; you all move together.
i think it’s a good idea to know when your head is in ideation mode versus execution mode. you shouldn’t outline when you want to be drafting, and you shouldn’t draft when you want to be outlining.
4 types of research for writing fiction
if you’ve had some college education, you’ve probably had at least one research methods class in your field and/or maybe English composition. in those classes, you’re taught how to use databases to find scholarly work that addresses what you’re studying so you can create and support a thesis.
i was hesitant to write research-based fiction for a long time because this was the process i thought of when i thought about research. and it’s exceptionally difficult to narrativize the information you find in scholarly writing, even when you still have to turn to it for certain subject matter that’s not written about or summarized elsewhere. beginning research for a novel can be totally overwhelming. where do you begin, and more importantly, where do you end? it sometimes feels like being a novelist means becoming a king, not a jack, of all trades. and i say that because writing fiction about something means having a familiarity with your subject matter such that you know what aspects of it to fictionalize. research-based fiction is always a negotiation of the truth. you have to know when to concede reality to narrative.
the main difficulty in writing research into fiction is the skill of embodying and representing information. factual information you learn has to be distorted through the lens of your POV, and you determine what they know and what they don’t, or what they think they know but are dead wrong about. for example, let’s say you’re writing about an era of time. your first stop is probably learning the events that happened during that era. next you determine how your character learns about or experiences those events. and after that, you determine how your character feels and responds to those experiences, and how the events of the real era affect the unreal events of your fiction.
this is the example i always give: let’s say you’re writing a story about a character living in New York City in the fall of 2001. if keeping to real events, regardless of what the story is about, your character will be affected by the events of 9/11. however, maybe in your story 9/11 doesn’t even happen. “but it was a major historical event!” you might say. well, yeah, but you’re not writing an historical account; you’re writing fiction. unless you’re writing a biopic, your character doesn’t exist in reality, and even if everything else is perfectly rendered, the fact remains that they did not live in that place in that time, and therefore everything else is subject to fabrication. do you know what street they live on? in what building? in what apartment? is that a real place, or is it a general composition of places based on your understanding of the city itself? do they work for a real company or one you made up?
in fiction there will always be some element of speculation, and with speculation comes potential inaccuracy. as much as you may try, you can’t create reality onto a page, you can only render your interpretation of it, and that rendering will always be biased toward your knowledge and experiences. a person who was in New York City in the fall of 2001 would be able to render the aftermath of 9/11 with more acuity than someone who was not. however, if you task yourself with writing a story where this is relevant to your character and/or conflict, your portrayal of that lived experience must be informed by a combination of research and imagination.
your story is not an academic paper with a thesis statement, but there is still a kind of process of theorizing, where the evidence provided does not argue a point necessarily, but convinces a reader to suspend their disbelief. unlike academic research, however—where it’s important to find peer-reviewed, reliable sources—researching for fiction involves more of a wild west approach. you’re not neatly filing away PDFs to be retrieved later and ethically cited, you’re a dragon who has begun building a hoard of data, reliable and unreliable, bad and good, in any and every medium there is. some of the hoard will be real gold; some of it will only be pretty, glittering rocks, shiny and worthless. it doesn’t matter. it all goes in the pile. what’s important is that you’re able to discern the golden from the gilded. ultimately, though, both can be of value to you.
in accumulating my own hoard, here are the 4 main categories i’ve sorted all information into, and how i approach that information when transferring it into a narrative. it’s important to note here that when i say information i don’t mean sources. sources contain information; i’m talking about digesting and categorizing the information you glean from them.
reality
real information is that which doesn’t need to be proven to exist. unless we get into weird philosophy stuff, if you and i are both in a room together looking at a chair, there is no argument that can be made regarding the existence of the chair. the chair is real. we can debate where the chair came from, how it was made, and who has sat on it, but ultimately, the chair is there.
sometimes i call this public information, in that what is real can be known by anyone. what is real is factual, external, and able to be witnessed. it’s the easiest information to obtain but the hardest to render. if you find the square footage of a house, you could go to that house and measure it yourself. public information is data that, if tested repeatedly, always comes out the same. however, the square footage of a house doesn’t really help you write about the experience of wandering around inside of it.
facts can always be distorted by context (or lack thereof). square footage is a testable fact, but living in a labyrinthian mansion is wholly different experience than flying into a plane hangar, even if they’re the same size. both may use facts to inform you, but those facts will inherently be distorted by their interpretation.
the most common public information is encyclopedic, or in contemporary times, wikipedic. as a college english instructor i think maybe i’m not supposed to admit that i love and often use wikipedia. “anyone can edit it!” people say. “it’s not a real source!” but i have faith in the dedication of nerds on the internet. and more importantly, public information’s best use to a fiction writer is to help build a framework.
before you ask questions, you have to learn what questions to ask. before you start searching, you have to know the terms and phrases that will allow you to find relevant information. here’s an analogy: the first thing you do when you start a jigsaw puzzle is dump all the pieces out and put the edge together first. the edge pieces give you both scope and shape—in other words, you have to figure out if the thing will even fit on your coffee table. you build outside in, not inside out. research is the same way. you have to see the border before you start placing the missing pieces.
truth
true information can only be trusted, not tested. unlike reality, truth can be proven but not witnessed. if you were to travel back in time to 1917, you would be able to witness the events of that time. but you can’t travel back in time, so you have to trust the reports of the people who were there.
sometimes i call this private information. when i say “truth” i mean the truth of individual experience. it’s subjective and interpretive. on one hand, finding individual experiences of your subject matter may become the majority of your research and therefore the most helpful. on the other, it’s also the most legwork. here’s where you begin aggregating massive amounts of information to internalize it so that you can render it fictionally with the level of accuracy you’re aiming for.
i’ve found the most efficient way to aggregate truth is by reading oral histories. an oral history is a collection of transcriptions of people telling their story of a place or event. for example, when i started this whole mess of Vietnam War research, i had what i thought was a very small question: how did conscripted men dodge the draft?
it took a while, but i found an out-of-print book of stories of anonymized men who had fled, or lied, or whatever other schemes they came up with to get out of military duty. i needed to find every possible way it could be done so that i could figure out what my character would do, how he would do it, and what the far-reaching consequences would be.
oral histories also help you understand the lexicon—and subsequent vernacular—of your subject matter, which in turn expands on your search for public information. in terms of vernacular, many of the interviewees used the acronym CO for “conscientious objector.” over the course of the book, i noticed CO went beyond the literal meaning and turned into a more nuanced sort of identity. a CO wasn’t just someone who objected to war, but someone who might grow their hair long in order to express that objection.
the greater your subject matter, the more complex the lexicon becomes. it’s hard enough learning the real names of things you don’t even know exist, but it becomes even harder when you task yourself with the myriad slang terms for those things, and which of those terms your character would use. for example, my leftist draft dodger character would use “CO” to describe the type of person who would object to the war, while my right-leaning marine character would use the more stereotyped term “hippie.” the former identifies as an objector and so uses its more respectful phrase; the latter detests objectors and so uses the derisive one.
what i find most frustrating about research isn’t the nouns—the terms for things—but the verbs—the word used in conjunction with that noun to lend it meaning. a person dodges the draft; he doesn’t flee from the draft or escape the draft or any other synonyms for “run away.” verbs are as subject to vernacular as nouns are. nouns are often short-hand monikers or acronyms of a thing, place, person, or idea. more importantly, they are easy to google. but verbs—the way nouns move—are hard to find in a basic search and may be figurative rather than literal. for example, you can enlist in the military (formal, literal) or you can join up (informal, figurative). verbs are the foundation of a narrative voice and therefore the key to not only knowing information about your subject but internalizing it. only once information is internalized can it then be narrativized.
other mediums/methods that offer private information:
interviews
documentaries
memoirs and autobiographies
letters
diaries/journals
interpretation
interpreted information is a response to reality and truth. sometimes that response is an opinion, sometimes it’s a claim, or sometimes it’s a simple explanation. it is easy to confuse interpretation with real or true information, especially if what’s being said is by a person or organization with ethos who is stating their interpretation as fact. you can believe an interpretation, but you can’t prove one. you can only find evidence to support it.
we will never know, for example, who assassinated John F. Kennedy or why. it is the truth that Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested for it, but concluding that he did it is only the interpretation of the events of November 22, 1963. there is compelling evidence that a conspiracy was at play, namely the Zapruder film which very clearly shows shots coming from two different directions. (and i mean conspiracy in the most literal of ways; not aliens and time travel and whatnot, but that more than one person was involved in the assassination, ergo they conspired.) you may believe the conspiracy theories, but they are neither reality nor truth. when reality and truth are inaccessible, interpretation is all that remains.
academic journal articles are a mix of real and interpreted information. in the humanities, real information is that which is being analyzed. a direct quote of a passage of literature is real; what is being deduced by that passage is interpreted. in the sciences, real information is in the data. interpreted information is in the conclusions drawn from that data. similarly, journalism or general nonfiction is a combination of reality, truth, and interpretation.
if an autobiography is the true story of someone’s life, biography is the interpretation of the true story of someone’s life. autobiography is not inherently more real than biography. in some cases, a biographer has more motivation to portray an accurate depiction of a life than a memoirist. i remember taking a creative nonfiction class, and our professor asked, “as memoirists, what is your obligation to objective fact?” she was a journalist and believed memoir should be as factually correct as possible. but we were all fiction writers, and so our response was, “uhh, none?”
you can feasibly find all the real and true information about your subject, but there is no end to interpretation. you can watch a Shakespeare play, and when it’s over, you have engaged in the entirety of that story, and can develop your own opinion and interpretation of it divorced of anyone else’s. but if you were to dive into the scholarship around it, you would be buried under an avalanche of research.
there are also some subjects that have no reality or truth, only interpretation. once, i looked up timekeeping on Mars. no human has been to Mars and so there’s no true account of it. we have adjacent factual data about Mars that leads then to speculation, which leads to interpretation. so all there was to find was the discourse happening about it by astronomers and timekeeping nerds. situations like that are great for a fiction writer, because that means you are truly free to fictionalize. it may be fictionalization informed by the opinion of a divisive wikipedia talk page, but it will be research-based nonetheless.
rendition
rendition is simple: it’s the fiction other writers have written about your research subject. rendition is to be taken with the greatest possible grain of salt, because while a text may be respected on the basis of narrative, it can’t be confused with reality or truth. it isn’t even interpretation—it’s the fictional product of interpretation.
rendered information is still important. first, you have the value of seeing the way other writers have portrayed your research subject. second, these texts may become your comp titles or aid in your pitch should you end up publishing the story you’re researching.
however, there are some subjects that can only be fictionally rendered, because both the public and private information is secret. specifically i’m talking about trade secret information.
the reason i append “trade” is because that’s most likely the sort of secret information that would differentiate it from private information, and obtaining that information means someone somewhere has broken a contract to give it to you, and there may be legal recourse for them.
for example, i worked at a bank. every year i had to sign a new trade secret agreement saying i wouldn’t talk about how the bank runs. you don’t mention where the hidden cameras in a branch are, or what the dye pack looks like and how to trigger it, or how many alarms there are. most people don’t even know that the safe deposit box vault and the cash vault are two different things. that’s not a secret, it’s just logic. people think that a cash vault is something you walk into like a walk-in freezer but it’s actually like a regular refrigerator. you open it and there are shelves and compartments and whatnot, and there are always vaults within the vault, usually separating cash from coin from negotiable tender. my point is, the code to open the vault is real information, but it cannot be given to you.
trade secret information is the reason that police procedurals and mafia movies can never be accurate. the public AND private information of their experiences isn’t available, and if it were, you wouldn’t be able to write about it. therefore trade secret information can only ever be informed by other fictional accounts, and those accounts are informed by other fictional accounts. and so all you can do is speculate as an outsider and try to suspend your reader’s disbelief, knowing they probably don’t know anything about it either.
when to stop
i don’t really know. i think you stop when you start consistently finding information you already knew in texts you haven’t read yet OR you want to dunk your head in a bucket of ice water. otherwise i think it depends on how intrinsically interested you are in your topic and how important it is to the story. even if i don’t end up writing this book at all—or if the Vietnam War only becomes a small part of it—i still feel like my time wasn’t wasted. my newfound knowledge of American history (that my public school education conveniently didn’t touch on) will still find its way into future projects.
you’ll notice i optimistically appended “part I” to the title of this newsletter. that’s because i’ve accumulated about 10k words on adjacent subject matter like annotating books, creating a personal index, keeping a commonplace notebook, and establishing suspension of disbelief in research-based fiction. i feel like i can go on forever about these things but letting myself get carried away gets overwhelming and eats in to my time actually writing the fiction for which i’m researching.
I was looking for a write up on how I can become a professional writer, especially writing to get paid, I stumbled on this write up and became a professional reader (listener), I listened to this write up for hours. Beauty with Brains indeed.
very few newsletter reach my inbox as I'm very selective when it comes to my personal email, but yours is always a gift ❤ btw those headshots look amazing!