Ok, how much research do you do?

Welcome to the boards.

I write romance-fantasy (as a rule) so my settings and such are all from my head. I do, however, have some pieces set in the south because that's where I'm from and I know the areas. The danger with a setting with which you're not familiar is that people who are familiar with it could read it and if anything doesn't ring true, they'll be taken out of the story.

I know I read a book set in Georgia and the writer wrote about the town's location, then mentioned heading down I-20 on her way to Macon. I-20 doesn't run through Macon and from her description of the town she was starting in, she'd never have been anywhere near I-20. The rest of the book was OK, but that detail was jarring to me.

I guess I'm just saying be careful when using real places or other details that might make some readers point and say, "Ah-ha! She's never been there in her life!"

Good luck.

i usually do enough research to satisfy myself of facts. however, if the facts are inconvienient i ignore them.

in my first work i reserched german WWII fighter aircraft, i found one i liked but its top gun turret didnt rotate. i made it rotate anyway-sure this will annoy aviation freek geeks but it worked for me.


writing is a combination of stuff you have heared stuff you have seen and stuff you have just made up. why do we make this stuff up? because it is good drama. we are not writing university text books.

research

My suggestion is to be true to your story with facts and locations portrayed correctly. Nothing in a story should detract from the rest of the story.

One of the reasons I began reading Patricia Cornwell was because she portrayed Richmond accurately, both in locations and feel. When the feel of the stories started to wander from the feel of the city, I lost interest.

Invariably, when you right about a place, you will have a reader who knows the city, the bars, and the haunts.

You will not be able to suspend belief if those people don't believe that are reading a story set in their town.

just a thought...awp

I have to disagree with Jerrymouse. If I was writing about WWII and I had to put in a specific fighter aircraft, or bomber as I assume in this case, and in that type bomber the top turret didn't rotate, I personally would never write in a book that it did. The one thing you should never do is lie to the reader, they wont thank you for it.

For myself I also write fantasy/paranormal romance. In most of my books the worlds that I write about don't exist therefore there is nothing concrete that I have to research. Now that doesn't mean I haven't researched things before. Thankfully most of the things I've written about I've researched extensively throughout my life but with my newest series I will be doing much more research. Not to mention when and if i decide to do other books on creatures such as djinn or atlantis or other things more research will be involved.

Now... if given the chance to research a location over in scotland i would jump at the chance! (then again that's me being selfish into wanting to go there too LOL)

I write international thrillers, and I always try to set events in places that I actually visited.
When that's not the case, I still try to make it as realistic as possible, i.e. I can place the action near a white Greek chapel at the top of a rock above the Aegean Sea, because I know there are places like that, even if I don't know exactly where and on which island.

Of course, if you want to go into detail about street names and the architecture of the houses, there's always the Internet.

disagree then, jvc.

Write your story, then find beta readers familiar with the locales, jobs, etc. to proof for you.

This doesn't mean blow off research. Google and Wikipedia are your very best friends. Google Images is an often overlooked venue.

I had key scenes set in several famous tourist spots that I'd never visited, so I Googled the heck out of the areas, caught every science channel documentary, then backed up my TV notes with more Googling. (Because they often get things wrong.) In one spot I was able to view live feed from cameras set up on hotel roofs--that was so COOL.

I found sites and pics put up by people who had been there, maps of the roads and topography maps, weather reports, studied until I could walk it blindfolded, then wrote my scenes.

Then I asked people who HAD been there if the words held up.

I must be good at my job, because it all rang true.

When I finally did visit one of those spots I was a bit freaked myself at how accurate I'd gotten things.

The research did not take me long. A couple of days on the computer, plucking out the facts needed for the story. You generally use 10% or less of what you find. Data dumps are a bore.

One thing you don't do is change the actuality to fit your story.

I recall a romance neo who wanted to have a sexual interlude between her characters taking place in the cockpit of a fighter plane. Having just been to an airshow the day before I'd seen her location. There was just enough space for a very lean and not too tall pilot to slip in. Even with the canopy up the space was too tiny, no breathing room. I couldn't imagine a worse spot for unplanned rumpy-pumpy. Ouch! (Not to mention security cameras and military dudes would be patroling the hanger, etc.)

She ignored that, too caught up in her little fantasy. Maybe she liked planes in the same way as that character in 1941.

She's still unpublished, by the way.

jerrymouse said:

disagree then, jvc.

Click to expand...

Many thanks for the permission to disagree, I am in the process of disagreeing with a few other people, let's hope they will grant me the permission also. If they don't, it could get a bit weird - I fight like a little girl who has barely any muscle control in her arms (You know when you wake up in the morning and have slept on your arm, and then it swings about- like that).

My research has been largely through reference books and the Internet. My story is set in antiquity (8th-century BC) in Palestine and Assyria. While I lived in the Mediterranean area for a couple years and did get to some ancient sites in Turkey, I never actually got to visit the sites my novel focuses on (travel restrictions and the like). I intend to some day, but for now the academic research will have to do.

I, too, try to stick to what facts are known because I don't want to be accused of shoddy research or just being outright wrong on a point of history. I view it as a credibility issue. I went so far as to build a solar and lunar eclipse calculator in Excel to use with NASA-supplied ephemeral data in determing whether or not I could reasonably include the impact of an eclipse to the story line. There were no remarkable lunar or solar events visible from Assyria in the time frame I was focusing on (there was a great one in 756BC, but that's a few years too late for the story), so I abandoned the idea of including the eclipse. I doubt anyone else would have gone to the trouble to check it out, but I would have known and it would have bugged me. That's enough of a deterrent.

I say do enough research that you feel comfortable writing about it. If you're saying to yourself "Make up details" then you haven't done enough. There are so many ways to get information online that you probably don't have to leave home to do it. For instance, if you are writing about firefighters, you could look around for a "firefighters forum", or look for a fire department's website and shoot them an email with questions. Or, my usual track is to find a book or two on the subject and read read read.

jerrymouse said:

i usually do enough research to satisfy myself of facts. however, if the facts are inconvienient i ignore them.

in my first work i reserched german WWII fighter aircraft, i found one i liked but its top gun turret didnt rotate. i made it rotate anyway-sure this will annoy aviation freek geeks but it worked for me.


writing is a combination of stuff you have heared stuff you have seen and stuff you have just made up. why do we make this stuff up? because it is good drama. we are not writing university text books.

Click to expand...

This wouldn't just annoy me, it would guarantee I'd never read another book by the same writer, and I'm not an aviation geek.

This is also an excellent reminder that you don't need to put your whole brain on the page:

Gillhoughly said:

...
The research did not take me long. A couple of days on the computer, plucking out the facts needed for the story. You generally use 10% or less of what you find. Data dumps are a bore.

Click to expand...

onetiredmama said:

I wanted to get the facts straight about the cities in my book, (major interstates, airports, universities etc.) but I was going to use fictional stores and bars along with real locations too. I have a scene in a snooty salon but don't want to use a real salon that might not appreciate such a portrayal of their business. Do you think that blend works with readers? My main character is on a journey and the book isn't based in one city, so I'll be giving little samplings of several cities and could never visit all of them. I am requesting information from each city's visitors bureau.

Click to expand...

All good ways to research! As someone else said, wikipedia is your friend, but requesting information from the visitor's bureau is even better. I agree with everyone else who says don't make up facts, but making up fictional stores and bars is definitely within your creative license! It's much better than picking a salon from the guidebook and portraying it negatively, etc.

Just get a feel for the area and do what you can. As long as you're not describing, say, town square as having some humongous statue when town square has a fountain or there isn't a set town square, you'll be fine.

Good luck with this!

Since I write humorous, plup SF I do various amounts of research mostly centered on how I think certain advances to technology will play out over time. It’s pretty subjective with mostly educated guessing combined with reading and emailing some the quantum physics people I know.

I try very hard not to let the research bog down the story.

I do try to be consistent though.

A poorly researched book will have serious trouble getting picked up, even if its the best written thing in the world.

You don't have to visit places, but get maps, tourist guides, etc. Research the history you need. You don't need to leave the house, but you have to get the details right. The internet is a wonderful thing.

But, if you can visit a place you're writing about, do it. Last year, I visited Monticello and Washington DC for a book about Thomas Jefferson. I got a lot of insight into Jefferson, just following his footsteps through his old haunts. There's a lot of stuff I wouldn't have learned if I didn't go. Most of the story will be set in Philadelphia however, a city I know like the back of my hand.

Jamesaritchie said:

This wouldn't just annoy me, it would guarantee I'd never read another book by the same writer, and I'm not an aviation geek.

Click to expand...

I am in complete agreement with James (although officially he agreed with me first ). I am not an aviation geek, but I am a pilot.

Something which constantly annoys me about scenes in films when a helicopter takes off. You always hear a cool, very nifty jet engine noise as they fly away. That sound is when the helicopter is first started up and bares no resemblence to the sound it makes in the hover or when it flies off.

I was watching an episode of Airwolf the other day with a friend. They chucked Airwolf out of the back of a plane and started it up in mid fall. That just can't happen. No matter what. Oh, a helicopter can't go past the speed of sound, either.

I am not a fan of novels which have decided that the truth about something just gets in the way, so they have to lie about it.

You should never put anything into a story that won't ring true to a reader, with the exception of magic, demons and alien life forms.

Seriously, you don't have to put every little detail about a specific area/city in the narrative, and months of brain-draining research won't take the place of good storytelling. But whatever you do decide to include should at least stand up under the scrutiny of the average reader.

Sometimes the coolest thing you can do is write something about a town that only locals know about, like a small annual festival or popular makeout spot. And you would be surprised what a few phone calls to bored people can produce.

I write historical fiction, and generally I don't do a lot of research anymore. The reason? I spent my childhood noting down every tidbit there was to know about certain ages and periods that interested me. I always got 10/10 on history, and I was the only student in Ghent who ever managed to get 20/20 on the history exam of Anglo-Saxon History.
So when I start to write a novel that is say, based in the 17th century, I already know a lot, and when I'm not sure about something, I just go and look up my notes. They're classified in the pre-computer era, so neatly in boxes per appropriate period, and according to points of interest.


Nickie

A ton!

Jamesaritchie said:

This wouldn't just annoy me, it would guarantee I'd never read another book by the same writer, and I'm not an aviation geek.

Click to expand...

if you are not, how would you know?

SC Harrison said:

You should never put anything into a story that won't ring true to a reader, with the exception of magic, demons and alien life forms.

Click to expand...

And even then it had better be internally consistent!

I research everything. Absolutely everything, exhaustively. I write fantasy fiction, so I don't have an easy time doing on location scouting, per se, but I'll google similar geographical areas (both text and image), look up scientific processes, delve into architectural history, whatever it takes. My fantasy is a bit on the gritty side, and my take on research is that if I try very hard to get the parts grounded in reality correct, the fantastic parts will ring that much more true. That doesn't mean that I need to tell the reader how a suspension bridge works, or the circumstances under which sand will turn to glass, but if I'm going to write about that stuff, I sure need to know.

I usually make up my towns, so I don't have to bother with pesky things like streets and locations, or I don't make mention of them if the town is well known (like L.A.) My books are set in a dystopic near future, so I have some leeway with technology and locations, but I still do a lot of research into things like guns, explosives, computer hacking, and lockpicking.