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Research in Fiction

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Since I write both fiction and nonfiction (a woman has to earn a living), people often ask about the differences between the two. It’s happened that on nonfiction projects, when those of us involved are struggling over how to present some complex technical issue, my colleagues will say it must be so much easier to “just make it up.” Oh?

Tarifa, Spain

Tarifa, looking toward Jebel Musa, a setting in one of my novels (photo: Manfred Werner, Creative Commons)

Thoughtful fiction writers put an enormous amount of research into their work. Obviously science fiction and techno-thriller writers do. It’s the grounding in realistic possibility that lets the reader travel alongside them. Writers in other genres do, too, perhaps less obviously. Research is why I joke that the FBI may show up on my doorstep any time now, given the amount of Internet digging I’ve done into terrorism and weapons. General research on these topics provides an endless stream of ideas and themes for plot development.

In last week’s post, I wrote about the importance of “details.” Research is also how the writer develops and manages those details and avoids errors. If I need a tree in the yard of a house in Princeton, I know what grows here (weedy locusts, draped in poison ivy). But if the house is in Rome, I have to find out what kinds of trees I’d find there. Then I can write that the patio was “thickly shaded by a fragrant sweet bay tree,” rather than “there was a tree in the yard.” Such specific details make a story more vivid in the mind of the reader. While it takes a few seconds to read those eight words, it may have taken an hour to do the research and weigh the arboreal options.

I remember reading a thriller set in Washington, D.C., where a character took a cab and checked the meter for the fare. Alas, in that time period, D.C. cabs used a zone system for establishing fares. There were no meters (there are now). Neither the author—nor his editor—had Washington cred, and I don’t want my readers distracted by such slip-ups.

Research provides essential local color. One of my plots takes the protagonist to Tarifa, Spain. I’ve been to Tarifa, but I can’t say I remember it in detail and didn’t take many pictures. So I did photo research, creating a file of streetscape snapshots that helped me envision where the characters walked, the kinds of restaurants they ate in, the weather, and the local youth culture’s kite-surfing obsession. Research on Tarifa hotels gave ideas about room layouts, décor, city views, and the like. So when I write that Archer Landis could look over the rooftops of Tarifa’s low whitewashed buildings across the Mediterranean to the Rif mountains in northern Morocco, I know that is in fact possible.

Research does more than enable accurate and detailed description. It also can uncover details that fuel the plot. In my novel set in Rome, one of the bad guys hides out in Riano, a small town north of Rome. Riano has a public webcam that shows live pictures of its main square. After watching that camera a while, I created a scene in which the Rome police spot Nic and his girlfriend shopping in the open-air market and set the local police on their trail.

A totally different kinds of research I’ve done is to read works in Italian side-by-side with the English translation, to try to get a feel for the language. Whether this has been at all useful, I can’t say, but it was fun. More practical are the discussion forums of WordReference.com where I’ve asked Rome locals about current street slang.

Maps are essential: police precincts, neighborhood boundaries, building layouts, including floorplans I create. Google Maps street-level views and geo-coded photos, ditto.

I am in awe of those who write historical fiction, some of whom have developed encyclopedic period knowledge. Alan Furst (Europe in the run-up to World War II) and Patrick O’Brian (the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic Wars) come to mind. Not only do they have to get the settings and clothing and historical details correct (no war before its time), changes in speech and language have been enormous. A teen character from a hundred years ago cannot convincingly say, “Whatever,” and the author cannot just write whatever, either.

In a recent interview, author Pinckney Benedict describes the research he did for the short story “The World, the Flesh, and the Devil,” which is told from the point of view of a highly trained fighter pilot. Benedict not only read extensively about fighter pilots and how they think, he spent hours debriefing a friend who was a Marine Phantom pilot in Vietnam, and he also cobbled together “a convincing flight simulator” in his basement and spent many hours in it, following the flight path of the character in the story. Research, he told the interviewer, “makes me ecstatic.”

I collect all my research for a novel in a three-ring binder, which includes the photos and maps like those mentioned above. It has a divider for the basics: the calendar for the year the story takes place, the times of sunrise and sunset in the city, and the phases of the moon for the appropriate season. I can’t have a full moon on a Tuesday and another one the following Sunday. I make notes about time zone differences, so I only have to look them up once. It has newspaper or magazine articles generally related to the subject matter of the story and details about clues I’ve planted or weapons used. This notebook is my personal encyclopedia, and I refer to it often. It keeps me consistent. It keeps me from “just making it up.”

****Glimmer Train

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Recently finished the Winter 2013 issue of Glimmer Train, one of the most competitive literary magazines on the U.S. scene, with 32,000 submissions a year. Its almost 200 pages included nine short stories and an interview with author Pinckney Benedict (after reading this interview and reveling in his awe-inspiring name, I bought his most recent book, Miracle Boy and Other Stories; apparently, he’s inspired other readers, too). $19.95 from Benedict’s hard-working small publisher, Press 53; $17.96 from amazon. Hoping my extra $1.99 is nurturing the dream of small publishers.

wrecked boat, ribs, sea

(photo: pixabay.com)

Among the stories, I especially liked “Angstschweiss” by Susan Messer, and anyone who’s had to make a trepidatious visit to a nursing home, rehab hospital, or other institution caring for the wreck of a loved one remembered in full-sail, will identify. The title of her novel, Grand River and Joy, Detroiters will recognize as an intersection, and far from being an uplifting statement, the book explores the city’s racial tensions that exploded with the 1967 riots—“complex, challenging, and bitterly funny.” On the “to read” list.

Two stories—“Wilderness of Ghosts” by Janis Hubschman and “Patient History” by Baird Harper—focused on young women troubled at leaping the chasm from late adolescence to “what’s next.” “Gladstone,” a charming story by Marjorie Celona, nicely capture the skewed neighborhood observations and preoccupations of a group of 10-year-old boys. Her novel Y—about the fractured life of a newborn baby left at the YMCA with a great many questions—one Goodreads reader said, “I don’t think I have ever been so sad to see a book end.”

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You Know Where the Devil Is

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In the details, right? Writing my brief review of the nonfiction book Spycraft this week started me thinking about details, because that book provided them in encyclopedic proportion (bad choice for an audio read; I should have bought a dead-tree copy instead). In my own writing and in reading the work of some twenty-five or thirty other newish writers, I’m well aware of the many ways details trip us up.

Writing description is a tightrope walker’s game. Authors have to include enough detail to put a picture (the right one) in the reader’s mind without being tedious. In the Victorian era, readers loved detail, and that’s part of what makes reading those novels hard for many people today, living life in the fast lane. Victorian detail came in long loopy sentences, but less ornate approaches can stimulate pictures in readers’ minds equally effectively. Read Cormac McCarthy to find starkly simple detail, yet surgically precise description: “The night was falling down from the east and the darkness that passed over them came in a sudden breath of cold and stillness and passed on. As if the darkness had a soul itself that was the sun’s assassin hurrying to the west, as once men did believe, as they may believe again” [The Crossing]. (McCarthy also teaches the subtle power of “and.”)

tightrope walker

(photo: wikimedia.org)

When the writer’s balance gets off—too much, too little—problems such as these occur: Pure decoration—a lot needs to be happening at different levels when moving a plot along, and it can be distracting when writers stop the action to explain that a particular weed was “no more than knee-high and had white, daisy-like flowers, each the size of a dime and centered with a bold dot of eggyolk yellow, and erupted in drifts along the dusty roadside,” if those weeds are never going to matter in the story. In Ordinary Grace by William Kent Krueger (recent winner of the 2014 Edgar award), he describes in detail a young punk’s Deuce Coupe, black with red and orange flames painted along the sides. The punk and the car figure prominently in the story, and, in subsequent mentions, all Krueger needs to do is mention the flames and the whole image—in all its symbolism—is brought back.

The irrelevant detail (or “Chekhov’s gun”)—Anton Chekhov famously said, “Remove everything that has no relevance to the story. If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it’s not going to be fired, it shouldn’t be hanging there.” I hate finishing a book with that “Whatever happened to—” feeling about some vividly described character or thing. Yes, authors can include red herrings, but they ultimately have to be understood as such. At the same time, the groundwork for the resolution of the plot—and in mystery-writing, the clues—must be artfully laid so that the ending seems true, not a deus ex machina, nor totally predictable. Scott Turow’s first book, Presumed Innocent, gave such a neon-lit early clue that I knew the killer’s identity from that page on. Disappointed.

Other common problems are:

red plate, pie

(photo: christmasstockimages.com)

The misplaced detail—It’s jarring to read a long description of a plate, a car, a dress—its shape, material, use, whatever—and then, five pages or paragraphs later, after the reader has formed a firm picture of this plate/car/dress, provide the additional information that it’s red. All such basic descriptive details need to be in one place. And should include the shade of red: cherry, scarlet, maroon. You may ask, what difference does it make whether the damn plate is blue or red? Color matters. I will assume the author made a thoughtful choice.

The lack of sensory detail—to engage readers, details need to vary—not always to appear as if the writer was copying off the character’s driver’s license—and to appeal to more than the sense of sight (“I saw her cooking”). They need to describe characteristics that demand our other senses, too, those we can feel, hear, taste, and smell. Was Mom in the kitchen cooking, or did the clattering pans reveal Grandma had arrived and the rich aroma of sizzling chicken fat mixed with the burnt-sugar smell of caramel assure Sunday dinner would be a feast?

Details about characters—my writing coach, Lauren B. Davis, gave the perfect summary of what to aspire to in describing a character. What to aim for, she said, are details that don’t just tell how a character looks, but who he is. Two examples from Margaret Atwood: “(She wore) penitential colours—less like something she’d chosen to put on than like something she’d been locked up in.” Or “He’s a large man, Walter—square-edged, like a plinth, with a neck that is not so much a neck as an extra shoulder” (both from The Blind Assassin).

To sum up, while details brings a story to life—writers need not too many, not too few, and just the right ones, Goldilocks.

The Dream of the Great American Novel

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classics, books, Great American Novel, Moby Dick

(picture: upload.wikimedia.org)

I hold out my hand. Take it, and wade with me into the murky waters of literary criticism as we consider the Great American Novel. Or, rather, Lawrence Buell’s 584-page new survey, The Dream of the Great American Novel. I’ve read several lengthy reviews of this book, as well as excerpts, and although I want to warm to the subject, I am feeling the chill of excessive academicism. Yes, there has to be more to literary criticism than “I liked it,” but I’m not ready to sacrifice on the altar of subjectivity my regard for an author’s achievement of beautiful writing or the creation of drama involving believable characters.

The entire concept of a Great American Novel (or G.A.N. as Henry James mockingly dubbed it) has come under repeated waves of skepticism, surviving “more as a dream than a goal,” Adam Gopnik suggests in his review in The New Yorker review (link below). Buell himself suggests that critics have believed the G.A.N. was “a misguided amateurish notion that had long since outlived its usefulness if ever it had any.” By the 1980s and 1990s, Michael Kimmage says in The New Republic, literary scholars “rejected the very notion of an American literature.”

The narrative form of the idealized G.A.N, Buell says in Salon (link below), is expected to “replicate the nation’s vast, sprawling, semichaotic social textures and landscapes from the macro to the minute.” Such an endeavor has been decried by some critics as “documentation for its own sake” and “the great American bore.” Yet, the sweeping realistic novel that would describe all social classes and stations of a particular historical period, that would have a narrative agenda—think Balzac, Thackeray, Dickens, or Zola—has not typically appeared in American literature. As Gopnik suggests, “in a country dedicated to the proposition of the autonomous individual, books about people defined by their place in a social web will never fly.”

Buell believes our greatest novels have splintered into four main subtypes, or “scripts” (and many of his observations apply equally well to American movies): tales of sexual transgression and punishment (e.g., The Scarlet Letter and its multitudinous progeny); the “up from” novel, which follows the protagonist from obscurity to prominence, and often back again; the romance of the divide, which dramatizes racial, cultural, or geographic fissures (all of Faulkner; Gatsby); and the “compendious meganovel,” which is generally not a true societal macrocosm, but more of a microscopic examination of a particular group of people or episode(The Goldfinch, Underworld, possibly).

Buell bases part of his analysis on the democratic notion that bloggers, internet chatters, and Amazon commenters’ views are important, too, thereby eroding the “firmness of the high culture versus mass culture distinction.” That seems admirable in concept, but shaky in execution, having tested my perceptions of various books against those of my fellow-amazonians and found bewildering diversity, with “Brilliant—best book ever!” followed by “Blech. Couldn’t finish it.” And, all-too-clearly, what sells is not the same as what is of lasting value.

For the record, books repeatedly cited as leading G.A.N. candidates by Buell and his reviewers include the schoolroom staples: Moby Dick, The Scarlet Letter, and Huckleberry Finn, along with Philip Roth’s “American Trilogy,” Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man, and Toni Morrison’s Beloved. (By contrast, the aforementioned readers place at the top of their lists of favorite books the works of Ayn Rand and L. Ron Hubbard, To Kill a Mockingbird, and The Lord of the Rings.) More recent G.A.N. candidates include David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest and Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections. I did finish that one, but I didn’t want to.

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Jennifer Egan’s Organic Writing

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Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Good Squad, Pulitzer Prize, writing, novel

Jennifer Egan (photo: upload.wikimedia,org – David Shankbone)

For a long time Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jennifer Egan hadn’t consciously intended to pull together the stories that eventually formed A Visit from the Good Squad into a novel. A recent Glimmer Train interview with talks about the completely organic way of writing she employed in doing so.

The set of stories that form the book’s chapters focus on people who circle the lives of the main characters—Bennie Salazar, an aging punk rocker and recording executive, divorced, and trying to connect with his nine-year old son, and Sasha, a kleptomaniac who has worked for him. Thus, we learn about Bennie’s and Sasha’s past indirectly through these confederates.

Each of these individual stories is told in a unique, technically different way. It wasn’t a matter of just selecting a character and some different approach to telling their story, it was more the challenge of creating stories that actually required different manners of telling. As a result, for example, one is written as a slightly cheesy news story (“Forty-Minute Lunch: Kitty Jackson Opens Up About Love, Fame, and Nixon!”), and another, in the unsettling second-person, begins, “Your friends are pretending to be all kinds of stuff, and your special job is to call them on it.”

Janet Maslin in The New York Times called the book “uncategorizable.” It wasn’t until Egan had the idea of treating the book like a concept album that its ultimate form suggested itself, she says. She had no desire to write a set of linked short stories with “a similarity of mood and tone.” (An example is Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge, which won the 2009 Pulitzer for fiction.)

“I wanted them to sound like they were parts of different books,” Egan says. “Because I felt if I could do that and still have them fuse, that it would be a much more complicated, rich experience.” Sticking with the record-industry theme, she says, “You would never want to listen to an album where all the songs had the same mood and tone.” The group Chicago comes to mind.

Chapter 12, structured as a PowerPoint presentation titled “Great Rock and Roll Pauses” (you can read it here), plunges into previously uncharted literary territory. This unlikely format her interviewer calls “destabilizing,” as well as beautiful and haunting. The challenge in using it, says Egan, was that it is basically a discontinuous form being manipulated to create a continuous narrative. In another writer’s hands, such a deviation from the expected might seem gimmicky, but in Egan’s view that particular chapter demanded to be told in a fragmented way, which PowerPoint enabled. Something unlikely to happen again, she says.

While the books experimentation was praised by critics and has baffled readers, Egan believes that the only legitimate way to experiment in writing is to let the content dictate the form. And that’s where the author’s creativity has to come through. Otherwise it’s an intellectual process laid on top of a story, which from the discerning reader’s point of view, never works.

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Everybody’s Favorite Read

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The Raven, MWA, Poe

Page by Ian Burt (photo: c2.staticflickr.com)

Yesterday the Mystery Writers of America announced winners of the 2014 Edgar Allan Poe Awards for the “best in mystery fiction, non-fiction, and television published or produced in 2013.” Among the winners were:

Links are to the Amazon.com descriptions, but here’s a directory of independent mystery booksellers, organized by state. Maybe one is close to you!

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Backpack Books

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Dickens

Dickens’s writing retreat in Rochester, England (photo: vweisfeld)

Books written in exotic locales have a zing of extra appeal. What would Elizabeth Catton’s The Luminaries be without Hokitika, Graham Greene’s The Quiet American without steamy Saigon, or Dickens’s Oliver Twist without London? If we’ve read these books, we’ve been to these places, at least in our imaginations. And, sometimes, only in our imaginations. The late Gabriel Garcia Márquez created such a detailed portrait of the fictional town of Macondo, every one of us who read One Hundred Years of Solitude feels down in our bones that we’ve been there. And, none of us want to visit the bleak Mexican borderland of Cormac McCarthy’s The Crossing or, God save us, Blood Meridian.

When sense of place is absent in a novel, we miss it. When place details are wrong, we notice. A few years ago, I read the thriller Gorky Park and enjoyed the first half a lot. It’s set in Moscow and created a vivid mental picture of the city. Then the action moved to New York, and the details were just . . . off, in ways I don’t remember now. Finally, the picture of New York became so discordant it threatened the credibility of the Moscow scenes.

Brooklyn-based publisher Akashik Books celebrates the importance of setting with its anthologies of place-based noir stories (Brooklyn Noir, Boston Noir, Trinidad Noir, Delhi Noir, Copenhangen Noir, and so on), new original writing set in distinct locales. A requirement for Akashik’s Mondays are Murder flash fiction series—“to get your week off to a dark start”—is that stories “be set in a distinct location of any neighborhood in any city, anywhere in the world, but it should be a story that could only be set in [that] neighborhood.” Such focus is essential for writers and brings their stories to life. Paradoxically, by being specific about places and people, writing becomes more universal, a point made by Donald Maass in his helpful Writing 21st Century Fiction. Generic places and stock, stereotypical characters don’t engage readers.

When I travel I take along books set in the place, hoping to intensify and enrich the travel experience. A time or two, that has backfired. The biography of Vlad the Impaler I carried with me to Romania last fall was I must say too intense and specific in its gruesome details, so that I abandoned it, half-read. Traveling in New Mexico and binge-reading a suitcase full of Tony Hillermans revealed such a repetitive story arc that I never picked up another. This was not something I’d ever noticed reading one or two a year.

An entertaining guidebook for place-based reading, or for armchair travelers wanting to steep themselves in a locale or rekindle memories of past visit is Nancy Pearl’s Book Lust to Go: Recommended Reading for Travelers, Vagabonds, and Dreamers (2010). Pearl recommends both fiction and nonfiction books for territories as wide as Oceana and as focused as her home town, Detroit. Alphabetically, she roams the world from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe. It will help me pick books for two trips to Canada this summer!

And, if you’re really into it—check out the Geoff Sawers’s literary maps of the U.S. and U.K., showing who writes where.

Lay on, Macduff!

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Macbeth, Sargent

Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth by John Singer Sargent (photo: farm2.staticflickr.com)

Word is out that Norwegian thriller writer Jo Nesbø, who writes a mystery series featuring brilliant and unorthodox Oslo police detective Harry Hole, is developing a crime noir, prose retelling of Macbeth. It’s part of the Hogarth Shakespeare project in which noted writers—including Pulitzer-winner Anne Tyler, noted Canadian author Margaret Atwood, and Man Booker prize-winner Howard Jacobson–are reinventing Shakespeare plays “for modern readers.”

It will be hard for Nesbø to top mystery writer David Hewson and Shakespeare scholar A.J. Hartley’s Macbeth: A Novel, which I have endlessly encouraged my friends and readers to immerse themselves in—especially the initial, audiobook version narrated by Alan Cumming. As a person who has listened to several hundred audio books, I can attest that this is one of the Very Best. You’ll never feel the same about Macbeth or those three witches, hereafter.

(The painting of actor Ellen Terry portraying Lady Macbeth is by one of my most revered artists, John Singer Sargent, who painted my favorite painting of all time, at London’s Tate Gallery.)

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Planner or Pantser?

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pantser, writing, author

(photo: upload.wikimedia.org)

This will make sense to the dwindling number of people who remember taking photographs with a Polaroid camera, when, as Anne Lamott says, “the film emerges from the camera with a grayish green murkiness that gradually becomes clearer and clearer.” She compares writing early drafts to watching a Polaroid develop, an inchoate beginning—often a vague mess, in fact—and an almost imperceptible sharpening, a coming into focus, with the people, the setting, everything as the writer sees it.

The question I’m most often asked about my writing is, do I plan the whole book out or do I let it develop as I go along? In writing circles, this distinction is between a “planner” and a “pantser”—a slightly snide reference to people who write “by the seat of their pants.” Most writers use one approach or the other. I use both, depending.

In the opening chapters of the mystery novel I’m finishing now (Sins of Omission), I throw in a lot of unexpected information—scars on a corpse’s wrists suggesting a serious suicide attempt, a snatch of overheard conversation—thinking it may be useful down the road. I also established the chief emotional conflicts for the main character (pride versus shame; bravery versus cowardice; and success versus fear of failing). I wrote about 20,000 words. I had a soup of messy situations, clues and maybe-clues, and a couple of dead bodies. I was at a stopping place, where the characters and plot needed to be reined in so that my eye was on the prize—the solution to the mystery—some 60,000 words ahead. And it would take that many words to get there and plausibly explain everything, consistent with the characters’ personalities and the difficult situations I’ve put them in.

At that 20,000 word mark, when I wasn’t quite sure where to go next, pantsing along, I took a big sheet of paper, wrote down each character’s name, scattered about, and listed every question I could think of relevant to that person. Mind, at that point, I could not answer these questions. But connections started to appear. Arrows. The next place the plot needed to develop was suddenly obvious. For a while, I unfolded that big sheet every morning and organized the plot around the actions needed to address the key questions. Not in 1, 2, 3 order, but in the order enabled by each new event or piece of information.  Some could be answered with a single toxicology report from the police lab, some required several chapters of set-up and resolution. Ultimately, I had 36 of these questions. Here are a few:

  1. Who was Hawk’s father?
  2. Where did Hawk get the drugs?
  3. Why did he confess to murder?
  4. What is Charleston hiding?
  5. What was Charleston’s relationship with Julia?
  6. Who killed Julia?

Even this sample reveals the extent of what I did not know as I was writing! Julia dies in Chapter 1, but we aren’t positive who killed her until Chapter 47 (of 52). Every 10,000 words or so, I reviewed the list. Is this question answered satisfactorily for the reader? If not, am I on a path to answering it? Is the Polaroid coming into focus?

Lately, I’ve started describing this process as “solving the mystery along with the reader.” That’s what it feels like and why I can get up every morning at 5 a.m. to write.

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Writing with Friends

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Room at the Table, Writing, WritersFor some time I’ve felt the many rewards of having a close group of friends in our writing group, which after almost a decade we’ve finally given a name: Room at the Table. The irony is, there isn’t any more room at my dining table, where we meet, because we’ve gradually grown to about 13, though only 10 or 11 of us make each monthly meeting. The group is about equally divided between men and women, all of us “over 35,” many of us also participants in Lauren B. Davis’s estimable “Sharpening the Quill” writing workshops.

Some members say they come for the snacks, but they all come with carefully reviewed submissions by others, and we spend the next two hours discussing each others’ work. We provide enthusiasm, help people get unstuck, ask the occasional big question (Where Is This Going?) and generously share our ideas and grammatical obsessions. Occasionally, we do an exercise from John Gardner’s The Art of Fiction, and one such, which involved imagining the characters of a ghost story, created such enthusiasm among the three of us (at the time) that we all wrote the story, and were all published.

I’ve heard of critique groups that like to eviscerate the author. That isn’t us. This week we tried something new. Five of us did a reading of our fiction at the local library and, unbelievably, 35 people came. They applauded the stories they heard, which were quite good. They had snacks, another area of expertise. They stayed to chat. Big success. Very proud.