How to Research a Book
“I’ve just spent a term teaching first-year writing based foundationally on primary source digital archive,” reads an email I got recently, “and I loved seeing my students discover that writing was much more interesting when they had research that was personally interesting to them.
“What does the research process look like for you, and when do you know it’s time to stop researching and start writing?”
The question is from professor Julie Kane of Washington and Lee University in Virginia, and research is one of my favorite things in the world. In fact, I found it hard to learn when to stop. Writing involves a series of skills that you don’t always know you have to learn. People can try to teach you—and I’ve taught writing for years—but I think you need to observe whether you tend to over-research, and if you do, find your own way to curb it.
Not just once, either. Is there anyone who doesn’t make the same mistakes over and over? People can even make one at the end of a string of successes. I love Hilary Mantel’s Cromwell trilogy, but in the last book, The Mirror and the Light, I sometimes felt she was doing a research dump, incorporating random facts she hadn’t found a place to use before.
“The emerald too is a stone of potent virtue,” she writes, “but if worn during the sexual act is liable to shatter. Yet it has a greenness to which no earthly green can compare, it is an Arabian stone and found in the nests of griffins; its verdant depths retore the weary mind and, if gazed on constantly, it sharpens the sight.”
Beautiful, but there’s rather a lot of this sort of thing when it has nothing to do with the story and doesn’t reveal a character’s thoughts. It’s the author speaking as she heads underwater, sinking from the weight of her research.
I discovered my tendency to over-research when I set out to write a multi-generational novel. Three love stories set in different three centuries. It was an ambitious project that I finally had to put aside, not knowing how to fix the problem, although I’m almost ready to pick it up again.
At first, I knew there was something the matter with the manuscript but didn’t know what it was. What made the book drag? Not everywhere, but quite often in the first section, which is set during the Napoleonic Wars. What caused those polite smiles to appear on the faces of friends who read excerpts? The pained looks from a couple of saints who read the whole thing?
Finally, I began to see that the research was too evident on the page. I’d spent so much time in archives and libraries that the background to the story weighed more heavily than the characters and the plot. There were too many facts and detailed descriptions. My poor characters also carried a weight of exposition, as if they were narrators in a documentary making sure to give readers all the facts. By which I mean all of them, when they should have been thinking, Oh, I’d better go pick up some milk.
After mulling this over for a while, I decided that the problem stemmed from doing too much research before I’d started to write the book. I’d spent so much time doing it that it was too important to me, and I was in love with irrelevant details about the time periods I was covering.
Yet once I’d reached this understanding—or at least, hypothesis—I didn’t circle back and do a rewrite.
Instead, I started a new novel, Mad Richard. It’s a wholly historical novel, unlike the multi-generational book, a third of which is set in the present day. Mad Richard follows the lives of two historic figures: writer Charlotte Brontë and the Victorian painter Richard Dadd, who spent most of his life in the Royal Bethlem Hospital–Bedlam–after committing a murder. The two could have met there when Charlotte Brontë paid a visit to the famous madhouse not long before she died.
Well, they can meet in a novel. So they do: a novel that explores what it means to be an artist.
Given what I’d learned, I decided to do a certain amount of research before sitting down to write the book, but to rein myself in before I got obsessed. It wasn’t hard to get started. My husband is directly descended from Richard Dadd’s uncle, which means we have family papers. I read the papers and a couple of books then got to work, only visiting the archives at the Royal Bethlem Hospital once I had the book well underway. Even then, I worked to keep the story paramount and the research in the background where it belonged.
I did the same thing on my latest novel. In Time Squared, a clever young woman meets a handsome soldier in 1811—the Napoleonic Wars again. (Um, I’d already done that part of the research when working on my abandoned novel.) Their love story unfolds in romance and misunderstandings, but with a twist: Eleanor and her soldier Robin keep jumping through time, and only Eleanor knows that it’s happening.
The story follows the couple through the Boer War, the First and Second World Wars, through Vietnam—and I made sure to research each section immediately before writing it. I knew too well that if I tried to research the whole book beforehand, I would have disappeared into a wormhole, never to be seen again.
Most recently, I’ve written a novel set during the Cuban Missile Crisis, Far Creek Road. It’s scheduled for publication in the fall of 2023. But the big multi-generational novel is also back on my plate, since I think I’ve finally learned enough about wrangling research to take on a rewrite. It won’t be easy to go back to the novel, but I think I can do it—and without further research. It takes a long time, but you can learn how to do this hard thing called writing. At least, I hope you can.
By the way, Professor Kane emailed the question about research to five writers, including me, who appeared on a panel about historical fiction at a Day of Dialog run by the Library Journal. It was the last question on the list she sent, and we didn’t get to it, since all of us might have talked a tiny little bit of too much earlier on. But I thought I would answer it anyway.
Update, 2024. Far Creek Road was indeed published last fall, and it’s available here.