Tag Archives: writing

Life Plus 70

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copyright

(artwork: Christopher Dombres, Creative Commons license)

Copyright is a battlefield for creative types—authors, bloggers, musicians, and artists. As both a producer and a user of digitized content, I want the rights to my creative output (such as it is!) protected and strive to respect the rights of others. At the same time, I want to enrich my content with good graphics, audio and video content, and the resources of other works.

A recent Louis Menand article in The New Yorker crosses into this fraught territory, starting with a little history. Legal backing for copyright began with Britain’s 1710 Statute of Anne, and, in the United States with Article I of the Constitution, giving Congress power “to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.” In 1790, the law set that time limit at 14 years, renewable for another 14. By 1998, as a result of the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, the time limit was extended to the author’s life plus 70 years—which some regard as a lengthy prison sentence for creative works.

Menand points out how different our attitudes about copyright are in the print versus the online worlds. “If , a year from now, someone else, without my permission, reprints my article . . . I can complain that my right to make copies is being violated.” Most people, Menand asserts, would agree with that. But if a Web site (like this one) posts an article referencing Menand’s piece and hyperlinks to it on The New Yorker website (as this one does), that seems normal in today’s world. Even a service. Courts have questioned the propriety of this, and it remains a grey area.

Meanwhile, billions of files are being downloaded—perhaps 40 billion a year—and an estimated 94% of these downloads are illegal and unmonetized, to the tune of $552 billion so far this year, according to Stamford, Conn.-based Tru Optik (“Game of Thrones” has the dubious distinction of being the world’s most illegally downloaded TV series).

Despite the uncertainties, various bibliographic initiatives worldwide are attempting to digitize the content of written works. Most visible in this country is Google’s effort to scan all known existing 129,864,880 books by 2020, an effort that has been plagued by numerous lawsuits. Google settled with publishers in 2012, and authors plan to appeal a negative ruling a year ago that deemed Google’s efforts “fair use,” since only “snippets” of text are provided for works under copyright protection, unless the copyright owner has granted permission for a more expansive view. However, the status of copyright protection is not always clear, as many potential rights-holders are unknown. (Google Books is a boon to genealogists, I can tell you.)

These disagreements arise in part because of a fundamental conflict in people’s understanding of the purpose of copyright. On one hand are those who think that, as Menand put it, “individual rights are intended to promote public goods.” These are the people, like the framers of the U.S. Constitution, who want to see works moved into the public domain for sharing, education, and entertainment. Historian Peter Baldwin characterizes them as “Silicon Valley.” On the other hand are those who believe the right to control one’s works “is not a political right. It’s a moral right.” These are people who want to maintain absolute control—Hollywood and the music industry.

The latter view comports more closely with European than Anglo-American views on the matter. My literary hero Charles Dickens conducted several popular speaking tours in the United States, in 1842 and thereafter, in which he read from his works. They added to his fame here, but his purpose was as much to fight for U.S. copyright protection for his and other foreign works, something that didn’t happen until the early 1890s.

The “moral rights” view is what gives the Broadway producers of Urinetown the ability to sue Akron’s Carousel Dinner Theatre for using “significant aspects” of the original Broadway production—direction, choreography, and design—beyond the script and songs for which the Ohio theater had a license. At the other end of the control spectrum, Menand says Samuel Beckett and his estate were well known for requiring theater companies wanting the rights to produce his plays to comply literally with Beckett’s stage directions. (Perhaps this is why all productions of Waiting for Godot look so bleakly similar—in form as well as content.)

On the Web, the problems and opportunities for misuse of others’ content are multiplied. It’s temptingly easy to obtain words, pictures, film, and music files to repost. The perils of doing so are described here and here. While one might think the sea of website postings offers virtual invisibility for a tiny misuse or sloppy repost, technology works against the user, through imbedded code that might as well put a flashing red light on an unauthorized use and search engines that patrol the web looking for them.

When I started my blog two years ago, I was clumsy in attempts to find good pictures for my posts and used a couple that were found and taken down and replaced with flashing warnings. Embarrassing, to say the least. Now, I check the “labeled for reuse” status in Google Images, have a slight preference for Creative Commons licensed pictures, or use one of my own. I also like the free and low-cost options at Imgembed, and while I can use those purchased photos on my website, I haven’t yet solved the problem of using them in the related social media promotion.

Yesterday, I posted a lighthearted exchange about Eminem and M&Ms, and found a trove of photos linking the two. Most appealing—and found with a second search under “labeled for reuse”—was a graphic portrait of the star created out of the candy. Perfect! I looked at the source website, which is an aggregator of cartoons and images that has lots of rights information for submitters but no information for reusers. I posted the photo, then, working on this article, pulled it down and sent the aggregator a permission request, returned to me as undeliverable. I know somebody “created” that artwork and should have credit. Absolutely not worth it to use it.

In one of my novels, I want to refer to lines from “Burnt Norton,” the wonderful T. S. Eliot poem. I’ve heard his estate is prickly about granting usage rights, even though a “Burnt Norton” Google search generates some 2.87 million results. I’ll work around it. There’s only so much time to write, and none at all to sit in endless conferences with intellectual property lawyers.

Additional Resources:
The Copyright Wars – by Peter Baldwin, 2014.
Stanford University Libraries Copyright and Fair Use Center – helpful advice, including for Web usages

Writing Tips from The Count

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Dracula's castle, Romania

Castle where Vlad the Impaler (“Count Dracula”) was imprisoned (photo: the author)

Inspired by Halloween’s rapid approach, the editors at Writers Digest have used the opening of Bram Stoker’s Dracula as a way to demonstrate 10 key writing techniques, as revealed in the book’s annotated version, with annotations by American horror author Mort Castle.

Among Castle’s observations are how tiny clues provide insight into the character of the book’s narrator, Jonathan Harker, including his domesticated notes to himself about getting recipes for his fiancee back in Victorian England. He praises how masterfully Stoker moves Harker through time and space to get the story moving, rather than lingering on blow-by-blow details of his journey to Hungary and on to Transylvania: “The impression I had was that we were leaving the West and entering the East; the most western of splendid bridges over the Danube, which is here of noble width and depth, took us among the traditions of Turkish rule.” Leaving the familiar, in other words, and crossing into the realms of the barely known.

A little further on, Stoker describes the people of the Transylvania region, “I read that every known superstition in the world is gathered into the horseshoe of the Carpathians, as if it were the centre of some sort of imaginative whirlpool.” Again, as Castle notes, he is setting the reader up for happenings that are beyond everyday knowledge. This must have been quite thrilling for people living in 1897 London.

There was a real Dracula, of course, a 15th c. leader of Wallachia, south of Transylvania. Here’s a well-regarded history of his cruel and violent rule—fighting those Turks, as well as his rivals—written by two Boston College history professors. Don’t read it unless you have a strong stomach. I couldn’t finish it. If Londoners nearly 120 years ago knew even dimly of this real prince, their bones were shivering from the start of Stoker’s tale!

Ravel-Edged Storytelling

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forest poetry

(photo: as0.geograph.org.uk)

A walk in the woods of poetry and prose and pleasantly lost in thickets of words.

The current (subscription only) newsletter from AGNI—Boston University’s well-regarded literary magazine—includes an interview with prize-winning poet and nonfiction writer Rosalie Moffett about “Ravel-Edged Storytelling.”

A Wallace Stegner fellow at Stanford University, Moffett says she mostly considers herself a poet, but believes that the two genres—poetry and nonfiction—“share a border, and sometimes I look up to find I’ve crossed it.” A work that started out to be one thing takes an unexpected and serendipitous turn to become the other. In reading this month’s submissions to the writer’s workshop I attend, I encountered one 1200-word short story excerpt that seemed to want to become a poem and might have become one, by just changing the line lengths.

Answering Questions

Moffett says she writes prose and poetry for the same reason: to answer questions and, most of the time, poems “end up being the best arena for my mind to answer them.” This suggests a mind that ranges freely through a forest of possible answers, where the ambiguity of words can be pulled into service of meaning and intent. Strung together in a particular way, they can be the perfect example of the whole being more than the sum of the parts. That phenomenon is is one function of subtext.

dinner table, family

(photo: creative commons generic license)

AGNI online offers Moffett’s essay Sidney, whose story she says absolutely required “the ravel-edged” kind of telling offered by prose. Prose also provided a more valid recreation of how she originally heard—or overheard—the family stories, and the stories about Sidney himself, with all their half-bits of information, inferences, and unanswered questions like loose threads in a bag of knitting ravaged by moths or kittens. Prose “puts our stories together in a way they never had the chance to be before people died, got bitter, or went off their rockers.” I urge you to link to it and start reading; you won’t be able to stop!

And Telling Stories

In the essay about Sidney, she talks about how as a child younger than six visiting her grandparents, she got up late in the evening feigning hunger, so she could camp out in the kitchen eating a bowl of cereal and overhearing the adults’ conversation in the next room: “I remember the music of the stories more than their substance. I sensed their pull and power. I wanted, suddenly, nothing more than to have stories to tell, and to sit at that table and tell them.” “Sidney” shows she absolutely got her wish.

I think I resonated with her responses in the interview largely because of the process in the last two weeks, of writing my blog posts, The Rouge Shadow and Coming to Amerika, based on a longer essay about my father’s immigrant parents. So different from Moffett, who can draw on a deep well of family detail—conversations, rooms she’s spent time in—I know next-to-nothing about my father’s parents. Yet, even from the few stray threads I have, many stories could be woven. To write these essays, I pieced together the backdrop for a plausible narrative from minute clues. Moffett says writing an essay “feels like the hunt for an answer.” And sometimes the answer is that there is none.

Further Reading

Rosalie Moffett’s website includes links to some of her poems, including this one, “Gifts from the 7-11.”

Agni is the ancient Vedic god of fire and guardian of humankind, a messenger to the other gods. You can find out more about this aptly named literary magazine here. And about the god of fire here.

The Art of Subtext, by Charles Baxter– The most eloquent and approachable group of essays on subtext that I’ve found. For only $3.88 used to $10.28 new, you can awaken to new possibilities. Reading it was like seeing, after not seeing.

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Life is a Riddle and a Mystery

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By Linda C. Wisniewski, Guest Blogger

pen and ink, writing, memoir

(photo: c1.staticflickr.com)

At my Unitarian church, we sing a hymn with the repeating refrain, “Mystery, mystery, life is a riddle and a mystery.” I read lots of mystery novels, and I write and teach memoir. For me, the two genres are not that far apart.

Writing a memoir is a lot like unraveling a mystery. Where you think you are going is often very different from where you find yourself at the end. Good memoir writing, and I mean good for the writer as well as the reader, always involves the process of self-discovery.

Just as all stories begin with the main character’s motivation or desire, the same is true in memoir. The writer wants to discover something about his life, or the characters in his life story. Quite often the process of writing changes the motivation of the memoirist.

In my memoir, Off Kilter, I wrote that “I wanted to understand why my mother couldn’t protect me from my father’s verbal abuse. I wanted to know why she cut me down instead of building me up….She let herself be silenced. She silenced herself. More than anything, I want to understand.”

While writing is not therapy, it can be therapeutic. It wasn’t so much that writing helped me understand my mother, but rather that it helped me accept who she was. I discovered the answer to the mystery of my life: I held in my hands the ability to create my own happiness, as a grown woman, apart from her. After Off Kilter was published, friends suggested more ways I could try to understand my mother. Call relatives, research history, read self-help books. But I was no longer interested. My motivation had changed.

In his memoir, Elsewhere, Richard Russo comes to suspect his mother suffered from obsessive-compulsive disorder and feels tremendous guilt, seeing himself as her “principal enabler. Because…like other addicts, obsessives can’t do it on their own. As they gradually lose the control they so desperately seek, they have little choice but to ensnare loved ones.” He holds this discovery for the very end, creating a powerful resolution for himself and the reader.

Years ago, I opened my lunchtime talk at a senior citizens center with the rhetorical question, “Why should you write your memoir?”

A tiny woman in the front row piped up so all could hear, “Yeah, why should I?” She made me laugh, but I totally get where she was coming from. I’ll bet her children and grandchildren were always telling her to write down the stories of her life. But she didn’t want to, and I was hard-pressed to convince her otherwise. I listed the mental and physical health benefits of writing about emotionally significant events, but she did not sign up for my class. And she had a very good point. She could see no reason to revisit the past.

Critics complain there are too many “confessional” memoirs, perhaps recalling the confession or romance magazines aimed at working-class women. In the New York Times Book Review Neil Genzlinger wrote a piece called “The Trouble with Memoirs,” in which he asked for a “moment of silence for the lost art of shutting up.” It caused quite a stir, but the conclusion can be drawn that he was complaining about badly written memoirs, of which there are many.

Stephen Elliott wrote in The Rumpus that “…celebrity memoirs are rarely interesting, despite how interesting their lives appear from the outside. The problem is not that they don’t live interesting lives, it’s that they’re not writers.”

Memoir writing is a risky proposition. “I see you in a whole different way now,” said my book club friend after reading Off Kilter. When I started to write seriously, I joined an online group called Risky Writers. We wrote and critiqued short pieces which involved emotional risk when shared. What would others think if they knew we had done these things? We learned to critique the writing, not the life style of the writer.

Despite the temptation to judge the lives of memoir writers, we don’t think of judging fictional characters. “She shouldn’t have done that!” Well, yes, she should have. That’s how she got into trouble, and why we keep turning the page, especially in a well-plotted mystery. Will she get what she wants in the end? Or does she discover something better?

Genzlinger ended his Times Book Review piece like this. “Maybe that’s a good rule of thumb: If you didn’t feel you were discovering something as you wrote your memoir, don’t publish it.” I would add, don’t publish it yet. And don’t give up looking for the mystery.

Linda Wisniewski

Linda Wisniewski (photo: courtesy of the author)

Linda C. Wisniewski lives in Doylestown, Pa., where she teaches memoir workshops and writes for a local newspaper. Her credits include newspapers,  Hippocampus, other literary magazines, and several anthologies. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and won first prizes in the Pearl Buck International Short Story Contest as well as the Wild River Review essay contest. Linda’s memoir, Off Kilter: a Woman’s Journey to Peace with Scoliosis, Her Mother, and Her Polish Heritage, was published in 2008 by Pearlsong Press. Visit her at www.lindawis.com.

What’s Your Green?

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Rorschach

(photo: wikimedia.org)

Having a political discussion with my friend Don is almost impossible. In conversation, I avoid the hot-button issues I know will set him off. Unfortunately more of those topics crowd the landscape of his mind than I anticipate, and stumbling on one is like setting off a land-mine. Why is it we can’t just have a conversation? It’s because our points of view are so different, there’s little room for mutual understanding, and we might as well be speaking different languages. Point-of-view determines not only which facts each of us takes in, but also what we see when we look at something as quotidian as three people standing on the street corner.

In a recent Glimmer Train essay on point-of-view, Bret Anthony Johnston, director of creative writing at Harvard, wrote that his students get this concept when he trots out the old saying, “To a hammer, the whole world looks like a nail.” He says writers need to understand their characters’ obsessions—their hammerness—and those ten-penny features that loom so large in their minds. Sometimes their preoccupations are so consuming they don’t see the pile of screws right nearby or, more likely, interpret it as another pile of nails. “To the brokenhearted, every couple looks happy,” he says.

I’ve read Johnston’s award-winning book of short stories Corpus Christi: Stories, and this year he published the novel, Remember Me Like This (NPR review and interview). The novel deals with a family whose son disappeared, then is returned to them four years later. While he understood going in that this lost, this hiatus in relationships, would color every aspect of his characters’ lives, “what I didn’t know was how different and revelatory their perspectives would be.” Each family member reacted in a unique and shaping way, and required of Johnston—and the reader—different levels of empathy. “In fiction,” he says, “every detail is a Rorschach test” to be interpreted through the lens of the character. We ask about a character’s experience not “what does it mean?” but “what does it mean to her?” If we didn’t, we could never read with understanding the story of anyone not exactly like ourselves, should there be such a person.

Despite the popularity of multitasking and our self-deception about our skill at it, in truth our brains are pretty much wired to handle one thing at a time. This inattentional blindness, Johnston says, is “point-of-view in its purest form.” What captures our characters’ attention demonstrates what they are most interested in and care about the most. This is perhaps why the unimportant details that new writers include in their scenes—in a misguided effort to make them concrete—are so distracting. “Find out what your characters notice, find out where their gazes linger and why, and you’ll find out who your characters are.”

Johnston has published a nifty set of writing exercises, too, and he included one with this essay. You might try it. He suggests grabbing pen and paper and moving through your surroundings making a list of everything you see that’s green. (This will be a long list in my case, as I always say, “I don’t care what color it is, as long as it’s green.”)

see, eye, green

(photo: c2.staticflickr.com)

Done? Did you notice particulars you’d forgotten about? Will you see items in your surroundings in a new way for a while? Were memories stimulated? Briefly, “green” was your mind’s obsession. I’ll bet dyed-in-the-wool environmentalists would create a somewhat different list than would a graphic designer.

“Now do the same thing for your characters,” Johnston says. “Find out what their ‘green’ is.” What readers need to know isn’t just what your characters look at, but, more important, what they see.

 

Creativity is UP!

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Up, Navy Pilot

(photo: wikimedia.org)

Metaphors We Live By (George Lakoff and Mark Johnson) is a classic study of the way metaphor shapes our understanding of the world. Published in 1980, it dismisses the idea that metaphors are strictly a matter of language, the frosting on the cake of meaning, as argued by various competing philosophical and linguistic traditions. In what I usually read, the search for truth is conducted not by academics, but by a fictional detective, so some of this was heavy going. Where the authors dig into the language, their examples are fascinating.

Lakoff and Johnson are not generally talking about literary metaphors, but rather about the ones so thoroughly absorbed into the language that we no longer notice them as metaphors. One fundamental set of such metaphors reflects “orientation”: up-down, in-out, back-front, and so on. Although some metaphors in this set appear to be more or less universal across languages, others are more culturally determined. In Western culture, many common phrases reflect the metaphor “happy is up” and its opposite, “sad is down.” Examples are:

  • That boosted my spirits.
  • I’m depressed.
  • It gave him a lift.
  • My heart sank.
  • Being up-beat.

Extending this pattern, health and life are up:

  • It’s time to get up.
  • He’s at the pinnacle of health.
  • Lazarus rose from the dead.
  • She sank into a coma.

More is up (this one, we even represent graphically):

  • My income rose last year.
  • The Dow reached a new high.

Having control is up:

  • He’s at the height of his powers.
  • She has control over the situation.

And so on. This metaphor is so pervasive, we don’t notice it. The other orientation pairs are embedded in the language in much the same way, and from the various concepts they signify, they form a coherent way of understanding our world.

Lakoff and Johnson also discuss how we depend on metaphor to help us structure inherently vague concepts, like emotions, in terms of more concrete things we may have directly experienced. Complex emotions, like love or anger, have inspired many overlapping (and sometimes conflicting) metaphors. For example:

  • Love (vague) is a journey (concrete).
  • Anger (vague) is hot (concrete).

The “love is a journey” metaphor underlies statements like: “We’re on the road to romance” (think Sinatra’s: “Nice ‘n’ Easy”); “It’s a rocky road to love.”; “We went in different directions.”; or “This relationship isn’t going anywhere.” The “anger is hot” metaphor leads to: “I was boiling mad”; “Cool it!”; and “in the heat of the moment.” (Icy cold anger is scary perhaps because it’s so counterintuitive.)

I’m trying to understand all this (which is the tip of the tip of the iceberg, you understand) in terms of writing. “We draw inferences, set goals, make commitments, and execute plans, all on the basis of how we in part structure our experience, consciously and unconsciously, by means of metaphor,” say Lakoff and Johnson. The orientation metaphors and their many variants perhaps explain why, a writer’s attempts to create a literary metaphor sometimes miss the mark. Perhaps they have violated this coherent, and implicit language system.

A linguistic exploration of the metaphors underlying emotion seems to me like an endorsement of the frequent dictum: “show, don’t tell.” Simply saying that a fictional character feels love or anger or happiness conveys little to the reader, because readers will have different ways—and many competing ways—of interpreting that emotion, depending on the metaphors through which they see the world. The metaphors underlying those feelings must be expressed—and in some fresh way that is consistent with the existing substrate (safer) or totally new, stretching both writer and reader.

Read more at: The Literary Link and, for some juicy literary metaphors, Welcome to the World of Metaphor.

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Put the Cat Out

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Siamese cat, Grant

Shut out again. (photo: author)

Steven King’s On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft focuses on how he became a writer and the process of becoming and many of his observations about being a writer ring true to me. Like most people who dispense advice to the novice, he emphasizes the virtue of “ass-in-the-chair”—writing every day, which is a groove serious writers finally work their way into, despite the distractions of kids, jobs, and grocery-shopping. Right now, for example, my lawn is shaggy as a pony’s winter coat.

He says if he doesn’t write daily, “the characters begin to stale off in my mind—they begin to seem like characters instead of real people . . . the excitement of spinning something new begins to fade.” Like many other writers, I hit the keyboard early in the morning, and the excitement King talks about is what gets me out of bed at five to grab a cup of coffee and dive into the work.

He also insists that you shut the office door, “your way of telling the world and yourself that you mean business.” Certainly, I shut mine, mostly to keep out Grant, a Siamese cat who thinks sitting in my lap and watching the cursor move across the screen has limited entertainment value and is something to complain about. (I created a monster when I played YouTube cat videos for him.) Eliminate distractions—phones, beeping email alerts, insistent cats—anything that takes you away from the page.

King tries to write 10 pages a day—about 2000 words. That’s his goal, and he thinks every writer should have one, every day. I’m a fan of getting a draft on paper, powering through and getting the story down and fixing all the inevitable issues and lapses and problems in rewrite. After that, I revise, a chapter a day.

Room, door (and the determination to shut it), goal. Adhering to these basics, he believes, makes writing easier over time. The more you do it, the easier it gets. “Don’t wait for the muse to come,” he says, and it’s astonishing how many would-be writers talk to me about their lack of or need for “inspiration,” as if it sprinkles down from the clouds rather than up from the mind’s carefully plowed field. King says, “Your job is make sure the muse knows where you’re going to be every day.”

Everyone who aspires to write has likely read a lot, too. We’ve listened to lots of TV and movie scripts. Lots of other people’s words, many not very good, have passed into our brains, and our subconscious is filled with the stuff. It’s in there. It wants out. When a phrase or scene comes too easily, almost unconsciously, I’ve learned there’s a problem. It’s canned, it’s derivative, it’s not a genuine product.

So now King gets to the hard part. You have to tell the truth. Your story’s truth. The writer cannot just be a pass-through for others’ words, ideas, conversations. “The job of fiction,” he says, “is to find the truth inside the story’s web of lies.” Even when we love the characters in a book and we really, really don’t want it to end, if the book has told the truth, we can feel satisfied when we turn that last page. If not, a squeaky voice starts up somewhere in our brain, Madeline’s Miss Clavel saying, “Something is not right.” As stunning as most of Gone Girl was—a web of lies if ever there was one—I thought the ending fell unexpectedly flat, and King has put his finger on the reason. In working out her denouement, author Gillian Flynn somehow strayed from the truth of her characters.

By contrast, truth-telling pervades the Pinckney Benedict stories I reviewed this week (on the home page for now; eventually the review will end up in “Reading . . .”). One of the best quotes describing the struggle to find the truth nugget is a favorite of my writing coach, Lauren Davis, and it’s from sports columnist Red Smith, who once said, “There’s nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.”

While that’s true, King also says that even the worst three hours he ever spent writing “were still pretty damned good.”

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****On Writing

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typewriter, writing

(photo: c1.staticflickr.com)

By Stephen King – Too snooty to read Stephen King for a long time, I was finally won over when a friend wouldn’t stop talking about 11-22-63, the audio version of which mesmerized me. Now I’ve taken the advice of a writing buddy and read this volume. It’s less a handbook of “how to” write a book—that is, put words on the page—and more “how to be” a writer, the habits of mind and body that are needed. The first section is a short autobiography, exploring the path King took to becoming a writer and some of the experiences that shaped his particular sensibility.

The second section discusses the writer’s toolbox (more on that another time), and a third section discusses the terrible 1999 accident that nearly killed him, when a van struck him as he took his daily four-mile walk. That section is called “On Living.” At the time of the accident, this book was only about half-finished, and the accident and long healing process naturally caused him to reconsider what he had written and what he meant by it. In the end, he says, the best part of the book, perhaps, “is a permission slip: you can, you should, and if you’re brave enough to start, you will. Writing is magic, as much the water of life as any other creative art. The water is free. So drink.” It’s a good read, and creative people—writers, especially—will, I think, find it engaging and helpful in many ways.

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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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