So, how’s that research going then?
If you do keep an eye on my scribbling, you may remember that I had a big sulk at the start of the year about needing research for my book, ‘At night all cats are grey.’ This was mostly the product of soul shattering self-doubt that inflicts us all from time to time, and me once a week, but it’s never a bad thing.
So, I hit the internet and the library and netted a few books on a variety of subjects related to the environment in which my book is set – namely New York gang culture, the seventies art and ,music scene and the Russian Mafia. I have to confess my reading list from the libruary caused a few raised eyebrows – Alpha city tales from the heroine infested slums of New York, next to a book on chocolate wedding cakes (although the later is not for my novel as such.)
Having never really done research about anything, or rather, having never researched for a book before, I wasn’t sure how to start – but the process seemed to break down into a few remarkably easy to follow stages.
1) Read the first few pages of everything. Mood swings from pleasure at finding exactly what you feel you need, and desperation that there is no way you will ever be able to convince in this genre, what the hell were you ever thinking, you don’t know this world and you must look like a tight tit for even trying.
2) Sulk.
3) Refuse to give in to sulk, and read some more. Start under lining things in the books you actually own, stick paper tags into the library books. This at least feels like you are doing something, like when you did ‘A’ levels.
4) Find something, which really climes with your book, which you thought you’d made up, but is apparently exactly how it was – feel elated and a little spooked – because it’s so exactly like you’ve written it must be a sign from some collective unconsciousness your tapping into.
5) Write five chapters in a hurry retelling the events described in the research material as if you’d thought of them.
6) Feel smug: feel sure you’re talking like a native.
7) Read them back. Hate them, feel you sound like a tit.
8) Edit the five chapters ruthlessly until only one line remains.
9) Realize that line is crucial, that it gives that elusive hint of reality without over powering your narrative, and that you would never have written it without the five preceding chapters of stuff now languishing in the bin.
10) Return the books to the library, three of them un-read – and wait until the next cycle of self-doubt sends you back there to check them out again.
And I presume I should add ‘and repeat’ after that lot.
I can say that, after research, my book is shorter but better and I know what happened to all the characters and why, but the reader doesn’t need to. It is very tempting to write footnotes along side every subtle detail – (the reason why character a is wearing a Thai silk shirt is that the Crime boss smuggles conflict diamonds from Africa to Thailand where they are used to buy heroin, which is then brought to America inside consignments of TV’s) but in fact, this is not what the book is about, it’s the foundation the research has allowed me to build the novel on. As it’s not actually about heroin dealing at all, it’s only important to me that I’ve worked it out. Oh, and the character likes the feeling of silk on his skin, but to work that out took a whole lot of other research….
10 Comments
I so recognise that business of the first stuff on the page being undigested research - data, as Rose Tremain calls it. For it to stop being data you have to leave it behind - forget it, in some fundamental way. I blogged about it a while ago here: http://emmadarwin.typepad.com/thisitchofwriting/2011/11/yours-to-remember-and-mine-to-forget.html
As you say, it's the amount packed in behind the stuff that gets to stay on the page, which gives the novel that sense of representing a world which is much bigger and more alive and complex than you'd have thought it possibly could be before you opened the book...
BUT...
I got a couple of killer sentences and some atmosphere.
I think that if I put every passage I've written for The Blackbird Effect in, it would at least double in size. But without the research, it would be a fairly generic novel. The research has added to the flavour of the book, sometimes literally. Eating faggots and peas in a bowl at Donelly's café on the balcony in Cardiff central market? Done it. But if the book ever got an American edition, that reference could be harder to explain...
All of this involves checking. And don't believe Wikipedia. It's a good place to start, but check check, check.
The more atmospheric details I try and track down in memoir or studies into the relevant subjects, found a great PHD on gang culture in New York written by a man of my age who grew up at the edge of Brooklyn and wasn't in a gang as such, but who was a young kid at a time when other kids were, he could have been but more by luck than judgement, he didn't go that way. My MC is not in a street gang either, but the insight into how this man saw the city divided by invisible boundaries and they way non-gang and gang members acted round each other, and the way the city was/is so divided on race lines, all helped get the right picture in my head.
I also don't think you necessarily need to always stick to reality, in the sense of mapping each square foot of your story - a lot of mine takes place in domestic settings, which don't need a post code to be real - sometimes meeting in a Diner on a cold day where the smell of coffee was accented with gasoline from the auto shop next door - gives you a sense of reality without needing to know that there is a diner next to an auto-shop on the corner of Lexington and fifth. (Which doesn't exist either!)
You need to make the world of your book real, and that's not always about being able to give a street address for every location, it's a question of degrees. It's a problem I have with some historical fiction, where you can get an endless list of well researched historical detail at the expense of a story - not all of course, but I've struggled through some real clunkers!
Yes - historical fiction as data handling. "Data is imaginatively inert" as Tremain says. You have to forget it, then wait for it to re-surface as you're writing.
I went over to Koh Samui to do exactly that for my new novella - lucky it's only a couple of hours away, but I hit a few potholes in the road so I know that's authentic...
A couple of points - one tip - you could try YouTube - there's a virtual mine of stuff - I used it for my Hawaii novellas.
Your comment regarding the smuggling of diamonds from Africa into Thailand where it's used to buy heroin. Look I'm no expert but I read a lot of local Thailand news forums etc. Nowadays, it's risky to smuggle heroin down to Bangkok and then by boat to China/Hong Kong or by air to the US (the law enforcement agencies are much more clued up and the penalties for being caught carry life sentences). There are better outlets in through Laos, Vietnam and Myanmar (Burma).
Thailand has an immense internal drug problem, and smugglers have switched to producing YaBa and Methamphetamines, which is widespread throughout Thailand. For heroin, if you change Thailand to Myanmar or Laos and then overland through to China, it is more up to date... And also, it would only be the extreme north of Thailand along the Myanmar border where such heroin trafficking originates.
Again, the book is not about the ins and outs of the heroin trade, I needed to know how it might be possible for the trade to fit into his boss' empire, the whole trade is set out in one paragraph, when my MC is at his daughters school presentation about 'my mummy and daddy' and his thoughts drift over what it is he does for a living -
This afternoon, her Daddy was due to take his monthly drive to Long Island where Mason owned a seafood processing plant. Mason had an interest in a number of up-market food halls and restaurants, and a controlling share in a small chain of oyster and champagne bars, which the plant supplied.
The plant had a small fleet of fishing boats; whose Russian crew occasionally landed a catch worth more than fat oysters and recalcitrant lobsters. Three dedicated female workers, swathed in white like novice nuns, shucked and packed it in a dedicated anti-room. Grigory went there to collect caviar, and make sure the busy little white trucks emblazoned with the company logo, knew exactly where they were to deliver.
Earlier on, after a faux paux where my MC uses his boss' Russian name to save his brother from a 'vor' (hardened Russian gangster freed from Stalin's Gulags), he is sent by Mason to London in a sort of exile. There he has an apparently meaningless task to do -
Mason glowered, ‘seen’ as how I’ve got to hide your ass, I might as well make use of you.’ Grigory saw a passport and an envelope. ‘Every week you gonna ring this number,’ Mason pushed the envelope toward him, ‘from a payphone. Don’t use the same one twice. Man you call’s gonna give you numbers and then he’s gonna tell you where to take them and who to give them too. You need money, you tell him and the guy you take the numbers to, gives it you.’ Mason lowered himself into his chair. ‘You don’t talk to people, you don’t make friends - you don’t get into trouble. You get lonely, ring your wife. Or your brother.’
Now honestly, I don't know what he's being asked to do, in that I don't know exactly what they are up to, but I know that the Russian Mafia were the first to get into credit card and white collar crime over other crime syndicates, they ripped off Meril Lynch and others for millions in the 1980's using stolen and cloned credit cards numbers. Grigory is largely ill educated at this point in time, so Mason chooses him to do this because he has to hide him and because he thinks he won't know what he's being asked to do - and I needed to get him away from his family for a while!
There's also a fair amount of red mafia in the U.K, and it's a known route for money laundering, so it all works towards my best guess at what's going on. This is pre-internet days (1985), in case you're wondering! My aim is to create something which works within the context of the book - if an expert on 1980's drugs and money trafficking read it they might not agree with every detail I use, buy my hope is that the average person will accept these details and frankly ignore them, the point being not the crime but the characters and plot within.
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