Research is the Spice of Life
By Guest | January 31, 2016 |
Our guest today is Aimie K. Runyan, author of historical fiction that highlights previously uncelebrated contributions of women in key moments in history. Her first novel Promised to the Crown comes out in April. She loves travel, music, and books above almost all things. She lives in Colorado with her husband and two children.
As a historian, I love digging through the archives and finding new and untapped sources for my books, but I know how hard it is to limit your findings when crafting a novel. I hope to help authors learn how to incorporate all their fun facts deftly in their stories to make them even more compelling.
Connect with Aimie on her blog, on Facebook, and on Twitter.
Research is the Spice of Life
It doesn’t matter what genre of fiction you write, chances are you will have to research at least a few details throughout the course of writing your novel. It can be time consuming, and the material you find can be overwhelming. Worse, when the details you uncover are used inexpertly, it can bog down your writing.
Think of your novel as an entrée and your research as the spices (I love to cook, so bear with the food metaphors). Some dishes require a lot of spice. In this case, historical fiction is like Jambalaya—it requires a lot of spice. The reader may only have a cursory understanding of the time and place, and you have to research nearly every detail of daily life to fully build your world. Other dishes, like a lovely beef tenderloin require less, or you’ll overpower the inherent flavor. Think contemporary fiction, romance, women’s fiction, and the like where the reader has first hand experience with the life and times of your characters. Research might be limited to specialty information pertaining to a character’s career or city where they live, for example. A lot of dishes, say a marinara sauce, are somewhere in the middle. I like to think mystery, thriller, and sci-fi fall here. You may need to do some extensive research on a scientific concept or a type of weapon, but a lot of the details of your world may need less explanation.
The trick is knowing how to use the spice with a steady hand.
The first rule is the most important: don’t use more spice than the dish calls for. (Choose carefully which details to include.) If we don’t need to know all the details of the manufacturing of the murder weapon in your mystery, don’t include them. It is *so* tempting to use every detail you find. You work hard on your research, and you want to use it. But needless details are needless words, and we all know what to do with those.
Use spice to do more than enhance the taste; make your dish smell, look, and feel as appealing as it tastes. (Use your research to appeal to a variety of senses.) The tendency is to focus on the visual, but research can help us develop a more three-dimensional image of the worlds we create. 
Get in the kitchen and make food your characters would eat. How does it taste, smell, feel on the tongue? Go to the fabric store and run your fingers over the silks or rough-hewn wools your character would have worn. Writing a murder mystery? Get to the range and fire off the murder weapon a few times. Know what the recoil feels like and watch others fire the weapon as well.
Don’t limit yourself to the same one or two spices. (Get your research from a variety of sources). Print resources are the first thing that comes to mind when we think of research, and I find myself tied to the same one or two secondary sources that I like on a topic. In the Information Age, we have videos, access to old news archives, and forums upon forums to ask for new and exciting places to unearth material. Be creative.
Don’t forget to think of your dinner guests. (Keep your audience in mind). What do they know and how much detail do they *want* to know about your topic? If this is a military thriller with huge appeal to veterans and historians, they may want a lot of detail. If you’re writing a historical romance where the love story is of central importance, rather than the setting, then you only need to add in the information that makes your world believable. (Caveat: even if the historical setting isn’t the primary focus of your book, that is no excuse for inaccuracies. Check your facts!)
Mix all your ingredients well! (Don’t let research show up in giants clumps in your writing). Just as no one wants a huge bite of pepper, even in Jambalaya, no one wants a massive passage of technical information in the middle of a thriller. One taught sentence about shoes in 16th century Lithuania can be intriguing. A paragraph is lethally boring.
Keeping these tips in mind as you incorporate research in your novel will go a long way to creating a work that effectively balances facts, data, and interesting tidbits with the all-important story you want to tell. And don’t worry about all those fascinating finds you found, but can’t use in your book. You now have a wealth of information to share on Facebook, Twitter, and your author blog that will help grow your online presence and establish you as an expert in your field—and there’s always your next book.
How have you incorporated research into your writing? Do you prefer mild or spicy? What tidbits can you share?
Many thanks to today’s guest.
You can read more WU guest posts by visiting this link.
I wrote my first middle grade historical recently, based around the 1968 loss of the USS Scorpion, the last US sub lost at sea. Though the history was fairly recent (Yes, I was alive, though barely out of diapers), there were a lot of details I had to check on. The families of those lost sailors are still around, and willing to offer help, but they’ll also notice the inconsistencies, so I wanted to take care not to take anything for granted. Song titles were a big one. Just because a song was a hit in 1968 doesn’t mean you should use it. Often those songs weren’t released until late that year, well after my story timeframe. Baseball stats, I was pleased to find out, are readily available, right down to individual games. But were they televised? Had to be careful there. Speaking of, TV Guide listings are also available online for dates going back into the early 60s. I had a blast looking up that info that is still somewhere in my memory.
I’d like to offer a suggestion for researching firearms. My dad is big into attending rendezvous. These are events hosted by sportsment’s clubs where the men and women dress up to their preferred time period and have shoots (often called a “woods walk”) with the firearms of their time. The camps are usually open to the public and the folks love talking about their favorite time period, normally between the French-Indian War and the Civil War. Ask to join a woods walk and they’ll let you tag along (bring hearing protection). There’s nothing like getting that real feel and smell of a muzzle loader going off ten feet away. Just Google “sportsmen’s clubs” in your area and find the events. Careful, though, it’s addicting and you may find yourself spending thousands of dollars on funny costumes and flint-lock rifles.
Thanks for the post! Back to my research.
Some great resources! And yes, the more recent the history, the more likely you are to be called out on inconsistencies by the lay reader. Best of luck on your research!
If only, when you’re researching, you could have some idea which bits you’ll actually need! Instead, you end up with so many more facts than you can or should use. *sigh* That’s my life, anyhow.
Great post (the spice metaphor will stay with me!) on using research so that it enhances your reader’s experience rather than validate all the time you spent at the university library. Especially depending on the ‘dish.’
I try to intersperse the description/facts with the action, because as a reader I’ll skim anything outside the story that gets too lengthy.
Very true. Mixing details with action whenever possible is definitely the smoothest way to go. And all those fun facts you can’t use in the book are great fodder for blogs and future books! Thanks for reading!
Research. I call it the salt-and-pepper of my historicals. Aimie K Runyon calls it the spice.
Spice is probably closer. The flavouring to the meal; not the meal.
First: the research must never overpower the story. It has to enter only where needed, and only in grounding the fiction.
Here’s how I see it. The historical timeline is the railway track of my novels. The railway coach is the setting, and the travellers are the characters: and what happens to the travellers during the journey is my story. Most important is the journey, not the vehicle.
Second: the research has GOT to be right. My readers probably know more about the history than I do. They are precise and demanding. A beta reader once told me that Hitler could not be where I put him on that particular day in the story: I had him in Zossen, but the reader said he was in Berchtesgaden. That’s how close my readers watch.
Details details details. They’ve got to be right.
Oh my word, yes. When dealing with major (and recent) political figures like that, many many readers will spot every minor inconsistency. It’s so hard to balance the *historical* with the *fiction* sometimes!
I love research! I write historical fantasy loosely based on 17th-century Europe. Writing fantasy gets me off the hook for specific dates, places and people, but I do want my world to feel authentic. So for the last several years (I’m writing book three of a planned five-book series based on the 30 Years War), I’ve been reading everything I can find about that conflict, making notes as I go. At this point, I’ve just about run out of books in English and German.
Then, if I run into something I need but don’t know, I look it up on the spot. The other day I needed an invention from the 1620’s with an unknown inventor. How about a complex microscope? Since it’s fantasy, I’ve jazzed it up a little (yay fantasy!), but it gives my mad scientist something to work on, and hopefully “feels” right to the reader.
The one time I couldn’t resist going into more than necessary detail was when a character in my second book had to train a horse to go into battle. I’d found a description of that process from a 17th-century English cavalry manual and by golly, I was going to use it! I still tried to keep it to a long -ish paragraph, and hoped it wasn’t too much. So far I’ve had a couple readers mention how they enjoyed that scene in particular, so I think it’s okay. So tempting to use all of those cool tid-bits, though!
BTW Aimie, your book looks very interesting. I’ll be sure to add it to my TBR list!
Your work sounds really interesting, sort of how GRR Martin has used Tudor England as the framework for Game of Thrones. Room to play, but a structure to build from. Best of luck! And if you read Promised, please let me know what you think!
Hi Aimie:
This topic is the one I selected for the WU collection of essays for Writer’s Digest, so I’ll restrain myself, except to say this is a great way of looking at how — and why — to research.
I’d add one thing: you can’t please every palate. Remember that some historical “facts” remain in fierce dispute and you may have to choose which authorities you trust (or find most intriguing), and accept that there will be others at the table who push your book away with an expression of disdain.
Get your facts right, and where you can’t, make the best decision you can and stand by that decision.
Thank you for this informative post, Aimie. Also, it’s nice to see all the historical fiction authors posting in the comments.
Another issue is that sometimes a detail is correct but may not sound as if it is. Readers can have very strong notions of what is possible in a particular period. I love happening upon the small facts that shake up my own view too. The reality is always more complex than I thought; thus, conveying that complexity while also moving the story along is an ongoing challenge.
This is awesome! I write fantasy that’s deeply based in real-world history/culture, so I have had a lot of opportunities to research. One of my favorite surprise finds was happening upon a perfume museum while exploring Venice, and spending ages figuring out which perfumes my characters would wear. (This is one of those details that’s not very important overall, but adds gentle focus when necessary.)
A favorite source of mine for setting research is travel books–whether straight-up non-fiction or creative non-fiction. VENICE by Jan Morris is breathtakingly detailed, lively, and full of atmosphere. Half of it is covered in my highlights and notes. But I’ve also found inspiration in Rick Steve’s guides and pamphlets I grab while passing through a city.