See,
research used to be a whole lot harder back in the day before the Internet. I
know there are a whole bunch of you right now clutching your hearts and staggering
around like Fred Sanford exclaiming; “No…no Internet? What did people do all day
long?” I could tell you but that’s another essay for another time. This one
here is about my ruminations and musings on the pitfalls of doing research.
Way back in
the 1980s in order to do my research for whatever I was working on at the time
what I would do is set aside a day (usually Saturday) to go to my local library
and spend the morning just researching. At that time I lived in Ebbets Field.
Which was
only a nice little thirty minute walk to the library on Grand Army Plaza. So I
got my exercise as well. Once the research was done I treated myself to the
rest of the day off.
So now we fast-forward
to the Internet Age where I can now simply Google any information about
anything at all and do my research in my pajamas in the comfort of my home
because now the library comes to me. And that’s a good thing. Maybe too much of
a good thing.
Let me
explain: the current project I’m working on is set during World War I during
what was one of the most important conflicts in the history of warfare: The
Battle of Cambrai. Cambrai is a town in France that is distinguished due to the
fact that it was first time tanks were used in large numbers in combat successfully.
Now, I know as much about The Battle of Cambrai as I do about the dark side of
the moon. But that’s where things get interesting.
I go ahead and
Google up The Battle of Cambrai and there’s a whole lotta good articles and
information on the battle. I breathe a sigh of relief and dig in. The trail of
research even leads me to YouTube as there’s a goodish number of documentaries
from the History Channel about The Battle of Cambrai. I’m encouraged now, y’see?
I hungrily absorb everything I’m learning and putting into the story as now I
feel much more confident being armed with dates, names and maps to give my
story a solid foundation.
So what’s
the problem?
I re-read
the first three chapters of the book and it occurred to me that what I had
actually done was bury the story under the weight of the dates, names and maps.
So intent had I been making sure I had the historical stuff right I sacrificed
doing the stuff that I know how to do: dialog, characterization, action. Y’know…the
stuff I had been asked to do on this project as that was the reason I had been
engaged to work on it in the first place.
And I’ve
always been the guy who preached that if facts got in the way of telling a good
story then throw the facts away and don’t worry about it. But I didn’t do it
this time and after some time I had it figured out as to why I wasn’t doing it.
These weren’t my characters and this wasn’t a setting I had chosen. My
confidence wasn’t holding me up on this one. And usually my confidence level is
ridiculously high. But not this time. This time I felt I needed the facts to
prove that I knew what I was doing.
And after a
couple of days of burning up brain cells meditating about the situation it got
through to me that I did know what I was doing. I was asked to write an action
packed pulp adventure full of derring-do, thrills and chills. I hadn’t been
asked to write a historical fiction novel ala
John Jakes. The historical stuff of World War I and The Battle of Cambrai was
just the backdrop for the story.
So what did
I do? Why I scrapped the first three chapters and rewrote them, of course. But
this time I only used just as much research as I needed to move the story along
and that’s all.
So what’s
the moral of this story? I guess it’s not to let research get in the way of
having fun writing. Unless of course you actually are writing a historical
fiction novel and in that case it’s of primary importance that you stick to the
facts. Or maybe the moral is that since
research is so easy to do now that it’s way too easy to get caught up in
research for research’s sake and convince yourself that you’re doing research
when you’re actually entertaining yourself swimming in the sea of research.
But you’ll
be glad to know that once I got through trudging through that bog, the novel
proved to be a lot easier to work on and it’s going faster than I thought it
would. What novel is this you ask?
Well, if I
told you that now then I wouldn’t have a subject for us to talk about the next
time, would I?
