Hello, writers. Next week’s Write On! will be hosted by Bonetti; yay Bonetti!
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I’ll be away, giving a talk at a writing workshop. The topic of the talk is finding the balance between research and writing. We’ve all been there, right?
Research is great fun --or at any rate, it beats writing— and so we tend to do a lot of it. Maybe even more than we need. Back when I used to write historical novels, I always ended up with more Interesting Facts than I could cram into the story. Sometimes I wanted the story to run detours so that it could pick up extra interesting facts on its way.
Usually for each historical novel, I would read ~100 books, email the authors (if still extant) to ask them questions, gather up whatever period ephemera I could find (menus, newspapers, guide books, maps… abebooks is a good place to find this kind of thing) and take some field trips.
When I was writing Hope Chest, I visited the Hermitage Hotel in Nashville, where some of the action in the book is set. I didn’t stay in the hotel, because it was a tad spendy, but I befriended the concierge, who knew a lot about the hotel and its history, much of which ended up in the book. (For example, he told me that women had to use the side entrance of the hotel and were not allowed to eat in the Grill Room.) He also told me that back in the day, there was said to be a secret passage between it and the Tennessee Capitol building, but that if it existed it was buried under subsequent renovations.
I desperately wanted that secret passage in my story. But there was just no way to cram it in. The characters had no need for it. All their alarums and excursions were happening above ground. I had to toss the secret passage.
Sometimes I have to remind myself that if readers really wanted to know every single damn fact I ferreted out, then they’d go and do the same research I did. What readers want is a story.
For my present work in progress, I’m researching sailing ships and extinct North American megafauna. I’m finding way more than I can use. And some of it is extraneous to the reader’s needs— readers don’t want every species of giant sloth, and every kind of warship and merchant ship ever made. I recently reread The Voyage of the Dawn Treader to remind myself how very little detail about sailing ships a book set on a sailing ship actually needs.
The trick is to have the right details. But just a few. Story comes first.
Since the above doesn’t lend itself to a tonight’s challenge, try this.
Choose one of the following first sentences below, and write the five sentences that come after it.
- Whoever finds a seed must plant it.
- You probably didn’t expect to see me here.
- Everyone left.
- The train was late, as usual.
- They always come at night.