How to Research a Novel: 7 Tips
Thomas W. Young, author of several thrillers, explains how to research your novel so you can create great characters and prose.
Ernest Hemingway said writers should develop a built-in bullshit detector. I imagine one reason he said that is because readers have their own BS indicators. They can tell when we writers are winging it. We have to know well the worlds in which our characters act. Readers don't have to believe the story really happened, but they need to believe it could have happened. So with that in mind, I offer a few thoughts on research for fiction.
1) You can't do too much research. In the military, we often say time spent gathering intelligence is seldom wasted. The same concept applies in writing a novel. You never know what little detail will give a scene the ring of authenticity. In a college creative writing class, I wrote about how a scuba diver got cut underwater, and in the filtered light at depth, the blood appeared green. Though the professor didn't think much of that particular story, he did concede he liked that detail. In fact, he said, "The author must have seen that." And indeed, I had.
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2) You can write what you know. We've all heard it before. Experience may be a cruel teacher, but it is a thorough one, and experience is the purest form of research. Things you've done in life (like scuba diving) can inform your writing in surprising ways, even if your characters aren't doing those same things. When I watch the old Star Trek shows, I can tell the creator of those stories knew something about how a military flight crew works together. He understood the dynamics of a chain of command, how a commander learns the strengths and weaknesses of his team, how those team members communicate and work together. Turns out that Gene Roddenberry flew B-17 bombers in World War II. Roddenberry, of course, never flew a starship. But he knew from experience how the crew of a starship might interact.
3) You can do research on the cheap. If you can't visit an exotic location, you can pick up the phone and ask questions. The worst that can happen is somebody thinks you're crazy and they hang up. Then you just call somebody else. (Believe me; I used to be a reporter, and I've learned a lot by asking questions.) You can visit a museum, or a museum's website. Develop an eye for small details.
(Tom's written for the blog before. See his previous column, "The Advice I Needed as a New Writer But Never Got.")
4) You can find anything on YouTube. Seriously. But you have to know your topic well enough to know how to search for it. In The Renegades, I have a character whose lungs collapse from a bullet wound. I wanted to find out how a medic would treat that condition. Sure enough, someone had posted on YouTube a video with detailed instructions on how to perform a needle decompression.
5) You can find things anywhere. You're a writer, so keep pen and paper within reach during all waking hours. You might get an idea from a news story on television, a song on the radio, or a Tweet from a friend. About a year ago, I was driving along on a warm day, listening to the radio with the windows down. An oldies station played "Wind of Change," the Scorpions' 1990 ballad hailing the end of the Cold War. I hadn't heard that song in a long time, and I cranked it up loud. The power chords brought back memories of flying relief missions to Bosnia while based at a disused Cold War alert facility in Germany. Not really a pleasant memory--for Bosnia, the end of the Cold War brought something worse. But that flashback from early in my military career inspired a scene in the novel I'm working on now.
6) You can use all your senses. Find out what things taste like, smell like, feel like. Say, for example, you set your novel in Warsaw. Maybe you can't afford to go to Warsaw, but you can go to a Polish restaurant. (See item number three above, about doing research on the cheap.) As you write one of your scenes, include a line about the texture and flavor of something your character eats. You've just made your writing more alive and authentic.
7) You can leave some things out. If you do thorough research, you'll find more material than you need, and no reader likes a data dump. In my own writing, I could bore you to death with the details of aircraft and weapons. But a very good creative writing professor once advised me to let the reader "overhear" the tech talk. Say, if my character punches off a HARM missile, that might sound authentic and pretty scary. But scary would turn to dull if I stopped the action to tell you that HARM stands for High-Speed Anti-Radiation Missile, which homes in on anti-aircraft missile radars. Who cares? The damn thing goes boom.
Since I began this discussion with a quote from a literary heavyweight of the twentieth century, I'll end it with another: Ezra Pound said literature is news that stays news. And a novelist has nearly the same obligation for accuracy as a news writer. Your made-up world must ring true. Not even fantasy writers can completely escape reality; the old Star Trek episodes sometimes referred to real science, which made them more believable within their context. Though we invent tales that didn't really happen, we drape them over a framework of real-life facts.
Tom Young, author of the military thrillers The Mullah's Storm and Silent Enemy. His newest novel, The Renegades, was released by Putnam in July 2012. As an instructor flight engineer, Young flies with the West Virginia Air National Guard, and he has served in Iraq and Afghanistan. He is a former writer and editor for the broadcast division of the Associated Press. You can find Young's website at www.tomyoungbooks.com.
