First Sunday Q&A: The Perils of Too Much--or Not Enough--Research

Aug 4

Q: I admit I love research—maybe too much. It’s my profession and also my favorite part of writing. I view it like putting together a very complex puzzle where each piece has its importance in making a good, true picture. And the truth of the picture is vital to me.

Sometimes I can’t tell when to stop researching and start writing, though. Is there too much research? How can you tell when you have enough in your pocket? What’s the best approach to balancing the two?

A: One of my past students is a historian and her writer’s group is all historians like her. She asked me to visit one of their meetings and talk about my writing life.

I loved working with this writer, and I was eager to meet her group, but I had some reservations about my ability to hold my own while talking with writers who were super skilled—and passionate about—history. History, to me, is founded on research. I am not a rockstar in that arena.

I deliberately stayed clear of research-heavy writing for most of my writing career. Leery of getting in trouble? Of someone who knows more than I do about a topic writing me (in fury? in scorn?) about my obvious mistakes, how I misrepresented an important fact?

When I was a food journalist, I had a safety net. I either worked with a fact-checking team at my publisher’s or I wrote about stuff I knew well from working in restaurants and developing recipes. I was already an expert in how to cook, choose ingredients, season, and store food. I knew food science. I’d lived it.

Personal essays and memoir are about your own thoughts and feelings, not often about facts—although they can bring in a topic of research if it’s a fascination to you, of course. I felt at ease writing in this genre too. It could all come back to my personal experience and opinion.

Fiction looked like an even easier ride. Or so I thought.

But we get pulled places we long to explore, and they are not always safe harbors. I had to venture into serious research territory for my first novel, even more for the second and third.

When this lovely group of historians met with me on zoom, it was really no surprise that eventually they began asking me about research for my second novel, A Woman’s Guide to Search & Rescue. I left the conversation with great respect for these skilled researchers. With much relief that I didn’t have to be one of them.

But I did understand the dilemma, even more, that most writers face between research and writing. How to do both, without sacrificing one for the other?

It comes down to: How do we keep our passion alive in our creative efforts—research, for instance—but still get our books written?

To me, it also comes down to three areas, which I want to explore in this post.

How important is research, and how does it weigh in different genres?
How do you go about the process of researching?
How do you tell when you have enough? How do you find balance between the fascination of discovery and real progress on a book project?

Podcast discussion of research

Some points I cover below are discussed on this podcast interview for Resilient Writers Radio Show. Prefer listening over reading? Click the link below.

Let’s talk genres

Writing nonfiction, especially fact-based? Good research is a given. You accurately represent the world you’re describing, whenever it has factual existence outside of yourself.

That means what? Well, if you talk about a place, you bring accuracy of that place into your descriptions. If you share historical facts, you do your best to use documented facts and information. If you talk science, you cite findings. If you include a real person, you do your best to accurately share findings from public knowledge bases or personal experience.

Nobody wants to misrepresent. It’s not fair and it can confuse your reader. What’s the point of any of that?

If we share interesting discoveries or information, it’s also correct to give credit to the person who originated it. So we provide a good link to the source. If readers want to know more than we’ve shared, they have clear direction of where to go.

This mostly goes without saying, but I’m refreshing myself and all of us on these basics because maybe they’re not clear. Good research forms a solid basis for believability. Of course, there’s often question about source accuracy, and we need to do due diligence—not just head to Wikipedia but look further, getting more than one source to provide verification.

This sounds tedious to some, exciting to others.

What about fiction?

Historical fiction is based on great research, of course. I don’t write it for that reason—the research takes up so much of the creating time (more about that below)—but I do understand how a writer can get totally swept up by a period of history and long to set a story in that time and place.

On our winter camper trip, one of my campground “free library” finds was a novel by JoJo Moyes, The Giver of Stars, which is about the traveling librarians in Depression-era Kentucky. Moyes shares the extensive research she did, and the book felt accurate to me as a reader, so I trusted this. That’s what you want to establish as a writer—a sense in the reader that they can trust your information about an era or place.

What happens when you move out of history in your fiction and don’t have that element to contend with? I still believe most novels and short stories need some research, some accuracy-test, to make them believable and trustworthy.

It’s up to you, the writer, how much you base your story on stuff that needs researching. I’ve climbed steadily into that need as I wrote each novel.

How do you research?

A reader wrote me these questions about research in my second novel, A Woman’s Guide to Search & Rescue: Please talk about your research process for all the flying/aviation aspects. It felt very realistic and I know little about flying. You obviously did much more research than what appeared in your book. How did you decide what details to include? How might you use information not included in the book?

That’s such a great conundrum for writers who start down the research trail. You inevitably learn much more than you can use, if you do it well. And how do you choose?

First, how do you begin research, say, on aviation when you’re not an aviator? Or substitute any topic you’re not versed in.

I grew up loving all things aviation because my mom was a pilot in World War II and it became a great legacy for me as a child and young adult. I remember going to airports to stand on the observation deck at night and watching planes take off and land. When I began teaching writing, I occasionally had a pilot or flight instructor among my students. I always longed to take them aside and ask them questions about flying.

When I began drafting A Woman’s Guide, I contacted one of the flight instructors who’d stayed in touch. I asked if she’d be willing to help me create believable, accurate flying sections for my novel. I wanted to open the book with a small plane crash where the pilot survives but the plane explodes. How was this possible?

She said yes, she’d be delighted, and she not only read my drafted scenes but took the plane crash scenario to her cohort of flight instructors to discuss. They came back to me with detailed instructions on what I’d need to set up, include, and revisit later in the book.

Don’t weigh down the story

Research makes a solid foundation for believability. But it can also weigh the story down.

If you include too many facts, just because they fascinate you or you’re worried about coming across as inaccurate, the tension of the tale itself will drop. That’s bad. So how do you know if you are overdoing or underdoing it?

I use feedback as my guide. When I needed facts about Search & Rescue, another former student came to my rescue and put me in touch with a SAR team leader who worked the California mountains. I sent her drafted scenes. I got back extensive feedback. I made changes until I got a thumbs up. But then in final revision, I read through these scenes for pacing, for tension, and I deleted a few sections. They were important to the experts, but not to the story. My goal wasn’t to inform the world about Search & Rescue; it was to make that aspect of the story convincing.

Feedback was essential to figuring out what was useful to the story and what weighed it down. As a writer fascinated with certain research facts—aviation lore—it can be hard to tell. After I got expert feedback, I went to my beta readers, my editor, and my proofreader for final thumbs up.

In the end, it must read accurately to both.

Artistic license

While I wish to be accurate in all ways, I also allow myself artistic license. When I reach a point of the story not working because of facts (and I’m writing fiction, after all), there’s room for leeway.

You know those disclaimers that publishers insert in the acknowledgements or copyrights page of most novels, the ones that say “it’s all coincidence if this seems like the story of your aunt or your hometown, because it’s not?” That’s a legal protection, of sorts, but it also allows the author to stretch facts for story purposes.

I ran into this with my third novel, Last Bets. It’s set on the Caribbean island of Bonaire, in the Netherland Antilles. I’ve been to Bonaire, I spent a week there scuba diving in my thirties, but I hadn’t been back. I felt uneasy about setting the story there since my memory of the island was not up to date. But each time I tried to replace the location, it felt wrong.

So I researched. Online, I could verify many details that would be used in the story, but two or three I couldn’t find. Again, I debated whether to jettison these parts—one was the luxury gated community where one of the characters had lived until he lost it all gambling. Another was the actual layout of the dive resort and hotel, the main setting for most of the scenes. I’d spent the week at a dive resort and thought it was close enough, but what to do about that gated community that probably didn’t exist on the real island?

It took me many months to work out this conundrum, but in the end I opted for a disclaimer in my Author Notes at the back of the book. I would fess up to readers that the real Bonaire is the inspiration for the novel but a few details were fictionalized to serve the story. So far, I haven’t gotten any hate mail.

I do believe in artistic license, the leeway we writers need to make our stories work beyond accuracy. As long as we do no harm, perhaps this is acceptable to most readers.

Rabbit hole

Research can be a rabbit hole. Even my historian group nodded to this possibility—when the research itself is totally fascinating, the writing can be put aside as secondary.

How do you balance this tendency, if you love research?

These techniques have worked for my students:

Set limits to your research. Decide how much time you can spend each writing session. Be reasonable, according to the stage of your project—the early stages may require more research time but don’t let it wipe out everything else. Some writers set aside certain days for research and do only that. Or they write for a specific amount of time or word count before they let themselves research.
Use the journalist TK to mark “research needed” and let you keep writing anyway. The TK becomes your placeholder for what you’ll add later. I used this with my aviation or SAR chapters: “TK plane crash” or “TK early morning SAR.” This is a tried-and-true method to keep the research from overwhelming the actual writing session.
Especially with Internet research, make sure you have a timer or alarm set to keep you aware of how many minutes or hours you’re away from your writing. Once I start looking at web pages and following links, I can get lost in the “just one more” syndrome. Just say no. You can come back tomorrow.
If you’re afraid of losing a trail online, bookmark the pages or copy links onto a document so you can easily return.

What has worked for you?