Hi folks

Just wondering if anyone had any tips or experiences they'd like to share on the subject of doing research - I did hardly any for my last novel - most of the things I needed to find out were just a google away.

Now I'm thinking of another large project (daren't say novel yet) large parts of which will be set in august 1958 - when my narrator is 14. I don't know what I need to know yet, other than a sense of what it might have been like to be a teenager in the late 1950s.

Anyone?

B

Lady B, I research before I write the first draft, to see if what I want to do is possible, and then emerge with a list of more to research after I've written it, butI try not to get bogged down during (which needn't preclude a quick google if it means you can finish a chapter)

And - sorry to be longwinded - this is a roughly filleted version of the notes I made for a talk I did in Australia:

research divides for me into

1) scenery – scene-setting – sense of place and period
2) manners – morals – zeitgeist – the world view
3) important facts that actually affect action and plot – travel, clothes, mealtimes, public events, living arrangements, religion
4) voice: how characters talk, in dialogue and in narrative

SCENERY, MANNER AND MORES, IMPORTANT FACTS
• fiction of the period is a big help – it tells you how people actually behaved, rather than how the men who wrote the etiquette books thought they should, also newspaper reports, letters, diaries, memoirs,
• things you might have to check – that they’d shake hands, that he’d take off his hat – but would a character mention it if it's standard?
• I always forget about hats and gloves and smoking.
• names – that the old nanny would call her Miss Lucy, she’s really Miss Durward, but her married sister is Mrs John, because she’s Mrs John Greenshaw
• automatic prejudices. deep-rooted anti-catholocism or anti-semitism or racism in the nicest people. it matters – it's authentic, and gives that shock of otherness and authenticity which is one of the reasons people read hist. fic.
• times it takes to travel, and arrangements. Porters at stations, tickets, guards. How fast driving is - slower cars, slower roads.
• what actually happened at real events – that’s the kind of history people tend to know. The big Dorling Kindersley Chronicle of the 20th Century is brilliant for this, also the kinds of 'Memories of the 50s' picture books that local libraries tend to have.


The risks of knowing lots of facts are:

• info dump - pulls the reader out of the world
• it reads indigestibly or worse still - boringly.
• you need to sneak in the least info you need, avoid info dumps, even if that means leaving out the fruits of days in a library.

Which is why I don't do research while I'm writing a first draft - the chunks of info just drop themselves in there undigested.


All this research is basically factual. It can be daunting, but you can find anything out, if you need to.
• The best aid to research is getting clever at googling.
• value of browsing in open library shelves
• surprising dividends – all my research into artificial limbs and the effects of amputation for TMOL, incidentally bred a story which was actually my first published work.
• Research for Writers by Ann Hoffman, regularly updated – it is UK-oriented
• I’m not a scholar, I’m not writing history – Jeanette Winterson’s narrator in The Passion ‘Trust me; I’m telling stories.’
• beware defaults – the traps are the things you don’t know you have to check: hats, gloves, smoking, food, (no avocados in 1958, say)

The tougher thing to research is VOICE.
• for me, this is the hardest thing to deconstruct
• can’t do without it, if only in dialogue
• reading the prose of the period helps, including non-fiction – reading aloud helps you hear it – don’t want pastiche – too hard to understand. Also the National Sound Archive (brilliant for factual research too)
• hugely valuable are words which are understandable to modern readers, but not the usual word – thesaurus invaluable – hoover up vocabulary as you research facts – that shock of otherness and authenticity we mentioned before
• ‘translating’ doesn’t work; modern slang may be equivalent, but it just says ‘modern’
• manners and morals research helps – how they talk to each other



Rather roughly edited, I fear, but I hope that helps
Emma

Gosh, all this is so impressive. I must admit I do as little research as I possibly can as it just makes me twitchy.

I do think you should only do as much or as little as you feel you want or need, without worrying how other people do it - after all your writing style is unique. But for this, I'd probably get hold of a person who was a teenager in the 1950s and ask them about their lives. People love talking about themselves - they'll be thrilled. Or go to Amazon/the Library and get a book about it and read it.

Then I'd make some notes, put them to one side and start to write. If odd things came up that I really, really needed to know about, I'd (a) cut them or (b) make a note and come back to them later.

Enjoy!

A
xxx

My wife sets a lot of her work in the 12c, so I’ll ask her as well.

I (try) to write modern crime novels and tend to research as I go along. Visiting locations or talking to people isn’t generally that difficult but I do google for most things.

Sometimes you can find places on the net and can ask the experts. In my previous book (which I’m struggling to get back to) I wanted some info on how Speed Camera’s might help identify the perpetrator of a crime. I e-mailed off a question, saying I was researching for a book, and got an excellent answer. I’ll post the response in full as at the time the last bit made me wonder if I was in the right job!

Hi Dave

The simple answer to your questions is 'yes'. And it does happen. Safety cameras are primarily there to detect speeding offences, of course, but even from our own experiences, information we've been able to provide has helped in a number of other investigations; including murder.

Some of our cameras take photographs on wet film. With those, we'd have a record of the vehicles that have committed offences through that camera at a particular date and time. With other vehicles, we'd have video film from the whole period we'd been enforcing. Coupled with technology that can automatically read number plates, it's technically possible to flag up particular registrations.

I hope that's helpful. I'm afraid I can't be too specific but I hope that's enough to answer your question. Best of luck with the book. Having just had a novel published by Pegasus a couple of weeks ago ('Ankhst' by Kevin Patton - available from any book shop/website!!), I sincerely wish you well.

Cheers!

Hi Murphy - that's brilliant! What are the chances of that! Have you checked out his book?

Hi Roger - I checked it out but didn't make a purchase. Perhaps I should have given him more support!

http://www.writewords.org.uk/members/buy.asp?member_Id=7540

For 'voice' nothing beats watching loads of movies of the period. My kind of research - settee, box of chocs, pile of old videos....

Rosy x

Thanks all - that all makes sense. I'm going to look at it all, get a feel for the period, and start writing - I don't think I will know what I need until I see what I've got to say and can pick up on the gaps - but thanks to Emma for the warning on traps. I was envisioning a scene that involved some sunblock and I got to wondering if there was sunblock as we know it in 1958 - perhaps a bit too early for the link between sun exposure and skin cancer to be known? I googled and wiki-ed for a bit, then found this

www.peoplesnetwork.gov.uk - if you press the 'enquire' button you can hook up to a reference librarian, ask your question and she will do a bit of your research for you. In ten minutes she provided me with two websites and the citations for three articles - now I know that there was sun-cream, although it wasn't very effective, and have the names of the popular brands and pictures of what the bottles looked like. (smells like jasmine and cocnut, with a thick consistency and a pinkish colour - in case you, like me were curious).

Hope this site will come in useful for you too - I think I might get addicted to it.

LadyB

just to say I am so glad Emma said that she leaves the big research till after the first draft. I am writing a children's fantasy that has scientific metaphors and ideas in it, and it seemed instinctive to me to try and get the story down first, and worry about the big research afterwards. It came out of concepts and ideas I was interested in anyway, so I had the base knowledge to root the story in, but I kind of felt that to research too much before getting the first draft done would kill the story.

I research by reading books in the same genre. That way I can skirt cliche, homage and stay away from repeating stuff. At the moment, I'm reading Philip K.Dick as I'm working on a sci-fi novel and watching a lot of cyberpunk movies. I'm aware of my influences but I don't let it rule me.

For my dark fantasy series, the research is much more intensive. I'm amounting quite a library that I'll begin reading once Endangerment Dolls is finished. These include The Jewish War by Josephus, a couple of books on the Crusades and the Templars, the Kabbalah and Jewish mysticism, and more than enough End of the World cheapo rantings from evangelists worldwide. I'm also planning a trip to Israel to catch the flavour of my settings, so it isn't a small project.

The internet can be helpful, but it is also chock full of misinformation, so I always try to check my sources in literature. Wikipedia is the main guilty culprit, and I'd take anything you read there with a pinch of salt as it can be added to by just about anyone.

JB

I'm knew to (trying) writing but what I would do is talk to older friends and family who were there. Also what I did when setting a storyline in the Chicago of the 50's I downloaded old photo's of Large hotels and a few train station so I could describe them well, things like that also never forgetting that it will still be post war britain with some rationing and conscription.
Hope this helps.

I agree with what others have said - I dive straight in, get about 5,000/10,000 words down and go 'unk! i need to do some research now!' I find the best sort of research is that which involves stories (I guess for you that would be reading memoirs set in the period) as there are so many story ideas you can adapt/steal.

tips for research: If you go and talk to people, write down a list of questions before you go. Don't be afraid to ask for more information and GET THEIR EMAIL ADDRESS. Then, if something occurs to you the next day that you really needed to ask, you can go back to them.

Try and get people to be as specific as they can. My novel was about a child with leukaemia. I asked medical practitioners what symptoms Sam would have. 'Oh, he'd be tired,' they said. 'Brilliant!' I think, until I get home and realise that tired means anything from feeling a bit drained to actually falling asleep every five minutes and that I really need to know which one it is. Also, i ask what medicine he'd be taking and they say morphine. 'Great!' I say and then realise when i come to write the scene, hang on, is this morphine in a pill? an injection? a drip? from a button you can press? It was really helpful to be able to go back to people and press for more details.

talk to as many people as you can and ask them the same questions over and over - you'll be amazed at how different the responses are. I asked a hospice nurse, a CLIC (home) nurse and a social worker at a children's hospital where Sam would be based. The hospice worker told me he might well be in a hospice, the CLIC nurse told me dying children dont really go to hospices, they want to be at home and the social worker told me that nowadays most parents keep them in hospitals trying treatment after treatment until they fall over.

also remember that, although factual details need to be correct, only you can know about emotions and how your character will respond to different situations. if someone says 'oh no, we didn't feel that', remember that although THEY may not have felt that, it doesn't mean your character wouldn't.

My latest WIP is set in London and I'm finding I can do a lot of research via Youtube, without having to pop down for a daytrip to walk the same routes as my MC.

I've lived in North london my whole life if there was anything you wanted to: if I can help?

Steve

Many thanks, Steve, I'll bear that in mind