When is Enough Research Enough?

            Mystery writers love Raymond Chandler.  As one of the world’s most famous writers of “hard boiled” detective and crime stories, he was known for being both lyrical and gritty at the same time.  His characters sprang to life and his knack for suspense kept the pages turning.  But even he neglected to do research now and again.  In describing a California coastline, he wrote “…rolling hills of yellow-white sand, terraced with pink moss.”  Well, unfortunately moss doesn’t come in pink.  What he was describing is ice plant, which grows along the sandy coasts in a dense profusion of almost blinding pink and purple.  Does it matter?  Not terribly.  Not if you’re Raymond Chandler.  But it might make an editor or a reader pause and mutter, “Wait a second—what?”

            So we need to research.  We want our stories to read as true, even if they’re fiction.  We want authentic detail.  When I was researching Jungle, an adventure which takes place on a fictitious island in the Indian Ocean, I couldn’t just make up my own plants and animals as if this were science fiction or fantasy.  I had to learn about the flora and fauna of the nearest countries, because they would likely share the same creatures and foliage.  Climate, weather, indigenous people—it had to match, to be plausible.  Did I get tired of reading about which birds could fly how far and could likely have migrated there? Yep.  Was it annoying to find a fantastic animal and then learn that it was nocturnal and wouldn’t work in a certain scene?  Yep.  But I wanted anthropologists and other scientists to be able to read this book without rolling their eyes.

            In writing Pinholes Into Heaven, which takes place in the Midwest, it helped enormously to have lived in Iowa for three years. It gave me a genuine sense of place, and immersion in Midwest attitudes and values.

            Not only do we need to spend hours and hours doing research, but we need to compile more than what we initially think is necessary.  We must know our locale, time in history, customs--- all of it—backwards and forwards.  Trust me-- some stray detail will come up, and you’ll be so glad you knew that a certain action could never have taken place in that setting.

            Research means that if your story takes place in a country near the equator, you won’t have an icy wind that makes your character pull a hoodie up over his head.  It means the humidity in Asia will make it difficult to bake meringue cookies.  Or that in India there are such strict social rules about caste and class,  that certain people simply do not speak to certain other people.  Or that in Korea there’s such a deferential politeness that it sounds unbelievable to American ears, where anybody can speak to anyone they wish.

            If you set your story in the rural South, you’d better know the cuisine, the local trees and animals, the Yessir-No Ma’am’s, and the phrases they use.  “Where’d you get that?” might be answered, “At the gettin’ store.” 

Have you ever read a story based in your own home town and caught mistakes-- things that were out of place or unlikely to happen there?  One reason writers often base their stories in towns where they live, is because they know these places.  The road names, the topography, the crime rate, the width of the streets, the smell of the lakes and canyons, the way the sidewalks buckle from tree roots on a certain avenue.   There’s a cadence to the speech in certain areas, a pace to the way people walk and move.  You can’t know these things without doing research.  And, even if you live there, you need to research for accuracy.  It’s the only way to avoid pink moss, growing along the beach.