The Research Masquerade

If you’re a writer like me, you probably started writing about familiar places and concepts. As your career progresses, however, you want to range out to other topics and maybe even time periods that are a bit foreign. Such endeavors call for extensive research about subjects you haven’t ever encountered in real life.

At the Ohioana Book Festival last month, I had the privilege of being on the panel with very talented authors. One was Anastasia Hastings, who has vast experience in writing about the Victorian era. While discussing her process, she talked about the balancing act of making a fictional book authentic without losing your audience to boredom. Considering I was already planning this post, my ears perked up at this brilliant statement of hers, “When someone picks up a fictional book, they’re not looking to read a history book.”

Granted, we authors appreciate when readers acknowledge our work as being well researched. Research, at least for me, can often be the most grueling part of composing the whole book. It’s important, too, because it has the power to keep your audience invested, instead of looking away from the page and rolling their eyes over how unrealistic something in the plot is. We need to become comfortable enough with a subject to be able to think about it in our own terms and style. At the same time, though, we need to employ control in how much detail we give and if it gets too far away from the storyline.

As I’ve admitted before, nonfiction has never been my strong suit. Back in school when I had to write biographies and the like, I’d sit with my research splayed out before me, and while careful not to plagiarize, I’d take a fact from this source and that source, put it in my own words, and call it a day. I usually earned a good grade, but I can’t say it showcased my writing style…or even stuck in my brain after I completed it!

Likewise, we could compromise our style if we try to implement too many facts and details that aren’t cohesive with the rest of the story. Doing so could still disengage readers, who, like Anastasia said, want a fictional plot. Bare facts from Wikipedia and such will pop out like a sore thump if it’s not disguised in the plotline. Sure, fiction can effectively teach, but readers will enjoy it more if it’s distributed in a creative fashion.

A good approach to take is to present the facts through the characters rather than through expositional narration. One of Anastasia’s techniques is to scatter in some brief references to current events of the day throughout the course of the plot. My favorite tool is dialogue. Any time I have to explain something technical or a concept that isn’t general knowledge, I like to have one character explain it to the other. Of course, you have to establish why that character has expertise in that specific area.

Other fun techniques to implement include having characters eat dishes from the era or location that you’ve centered the story around. More than that, you can show the characters’ reaction to such. That can make your audience feel like they are living that experience right alongside them.

With that in mind, writers have the opportunity to take readers on adventures they may never get to live in real life. Thus, it’s vital to be well-researched while developing storylines, in hopes of giving them an authentic experience. Even though we may like to show that we know what we’re talking about, we don’t need to prove that we’ve spent countless hours reading up on the subject. Rather, we should use that knowledge to usher them into the book with us and our characters so that they can have an escape as enjoyable as a real excursion.