Heinleining the Just in Time Research

While I was writing Impaler, I did a lot of research (no surprises here - Australian, never been to Europe, only seen snow a few times (courtesy Pennsylvania winters), and I'm writing a book set over six hundred years ago, in Eastern Europe, in winter, involving cultures I had never experienced except through reading books). The funny thing was, most of the research happened rather like modern inventory management - "just in time".

I'd been absorbing general books about the area and the time period for years, but that's not enough for the kind of specifics I was looking for. Things like "Okay, it's mid-winter. Snow - quite a lot of it for the most part - on the ground. Danube River frozen over to the extent that you can march an army across it. How far is that army going to get in a day?" (Not very, especially if they're dealing with unbroken snow). I learned a lot about logistics just dealing with that question.

Then there's the more interesting bits: Vlad is trying to get his army south without Sultan Mehmed II realizing what he's up to - preferably before Mehmed realizes the Wallachian crown has changed hands (again). He needs stealth. Moving several thousand men and horses doesn't correlate terribly well with "stealth" when you're marching them through the countryside - so Vlad comes up with the idea of taking out the enemy garrisons, and sharing the loot with the locals to buy their favor so they don't say anything.

To us, that's not a big issue - but in his time, it was unheard of. Similarly Vlad's decision to buy food rather than loot - despite the high cost (he makes the observation at one point that at this time of year food is worth more than gold) - was a total departure from the norms of the time. Knowing the norms of the time is general research, but the specifics, down to nuts and bolts sometimes, were things that typically I didn't realize I needed until I got to that part of the book.

So, just before the battle for Varna, I spent quite some time trying to find out what Varna's defenses looked like in 1477, as well as the likely impact of the 1444 battle (minimal, since the town itself wasn't directly involved), the architecture of the town, the layout of the governor's palace and where it was in relation to everything else, likely local culture, and so forth. This is not something that is readily available even to the best Google-fu. Google maps helps, interestingly enough. You get a good sense of terrain from that.

Ultimately, I ended up with guesses seeded with the very few pieces of hard data I managed to unearth - things like the old Roman baths still working and converted to Turkish-style, Roman ruins by the palace (which undoubtedly provided their own defensive layer, just by existing), and tried to give the impression of knowing a lot about the place when there was actually buggerall that I could find. Smoke and mirrors, the greatest art of the writer. Mostly I used a blend of known trends in better documented regions as close by as I could get them.

There were quite a few smaller research binges - working out what trees would be growing where, for instance, given that except in the more inaccessible parts of mountain ranges it's pretty unlikely the vegetation now is going to be much like the vegetation then. Phases of the moon in early 1477 was another critical aspect of the story - and that included the extra fun of figuring out whether the lunar calendars I was working from had made the conversion back to the Julian calendar, which was the only one being used in that region at the time (the Gregorian calendar wasn't devised until quite some time later). When various religious festivals occurred, Orthodox and Roman (at that stage, they were in synch - the combination of the Gregorian calendar and a revised method of calculating Easter shifted the Roman religious calendar relative to the Orthodox). I also needed to check and keep track of what, if any, major Jewish and Islamic festivals would be happening, and figure out the local forms of said festivals for the time frame I was working with.

It's much easier if you're writing fantasy - you can just make this stuff up. On the flip side, when you do make it up from the whole cloth, it tends not to be as richly detailed as something that's already got hundreds of years of history behind it. I suspect that's why PTerry uses Earth history and legend and twists it for the Discworld: he gets that richness without having to get all the fiddly little details right.

The big research binge - which took me a few weeks, to get everything I needed and build the right images in my head - was for Constantinople, of course. There, I was reading contemporary accounts of the fall of Constantinople in 1453 (eye openers all by themselves), whatever references I could find about repairs and new building in the nearly 25 years since the siege - including tidbits like the northern section of the walls hadn't been rebuilt, but the Golden Gate had been bricked up possibly due to a legend that stated a Christian savior would enter the city in triumph through the Golden Gate (Vlad's entrance isn't exactly "triumphal", but one suspects that little detail won't matter terribly much).

I even found not-quite-period maps, which were close enough to give me an idea of what the city looked like, detailed information about the walls (I was bringing them down, so I needed to know what that was going to take), as well as all the things a pyromaniac could do with a large supply of black powder.

The results of that deserve their own post, about medieval-style battle tactics - which I also learned way too much about. Of course, none of this (I hope) is lectured in the book. Hopefully it's all part of the background, so everything fits without being obtrusive.

Which leads of course to the question: aside from PTerry, who else does a really good job of Heinleining background information like this into their books?

Research Matters

Oh, yes it does, even - or perhaps especially - if you're writing something involving worlds, pasts and futures that never actually existed. You see, Dave's post and the discussion about it afterwards is only part of the battle. If your story is set in Paris, then given a general time period, most people already have a handy-dandy little mental picture we can use to hang the story from. Granted, the little mental picture might come from a Disney cartoon, but it's enough to give the illusion of a sense of place. In the same way, American Civil War immediately brings to mind the handy-dandy mental picture of Scarlett O'Hara dresses and gentlemen fighting for honor, and oppressed slaves (hopefully not all in the Scarlett O'Hara dresses).

If you're writing SF or Fantasy, you can use key words to evoke the handy-dandy little mental picture: to most people the word "spaceship" gets a picture that probably blends the most recent Hollywood blockbuster, the flying saucer, and a few other odds and sods - unless you describe it first. "Uniform" in this context is almost certainly going to be tight-fitting, and "body armor" something like Storm Troopers, or like one of the assorted SF anime series.

On the fantasy side, "elf" is enough to bring the Lord of the Rings movies to mind. For that matter, unless you explicitly state otherwise, most people are likely to assume quasi-medieval cartoony European rural.

So where is research in all this?

Start by reading Sir PTerry. Now consider that everything in the Discworld starts somewhere in Earth's history and mythology. Yep. All of it - although I really do not want to know where the inspiration for the World's Best Dad mugs in the Exquisition's torture chambers came from. It's not just the weird and occasionally horrible trivia, either: take a stroll through pretty much anything from Wyrd Sisters on, and you'll find all sorts of world views beautifully integrated into the book.

And that, more than fact, is the gold writers need to be chasing.

I'm pretty sure that's not something anyone else is telling you. It's either some kind of mushy "all cultures are equal" - which isn't true, because they're patently not the same, and other people are very much not just like us with interesting food and costumes - or you're getting "write what you know" with the subtext that if you don't belong to the group in question you can't possibly write about it, insulting everyone with an imagination in the process... Anyway, what research can give you is the accounts of people who belong to cultures that resemble your imagined one to some extent - and which reveal the mindset and worldview of those people.

Say you're writing an Asian-themed fantasy, and you want a world that echoes Imperial China of the Han Dynasty. You go looking (Google is your friend) for translations of documents written in that era. Anything you can find is helpful, although if you can find responses to stressful events it's even better. Eyewitness accounts of this disaster or that war compared with a more or less impartial history of the same era can reveal all sorts of things - something Sir PTerry played on with his usual skill in Interesting Times, with Twoflower's incredulous reaction to ordinary people telling soldiers to (more or less) bugger off and the soldiers not retaliating. The urinating dog pictogram is a cleverly placed gag to soften the impact of the real message. I could go on forever about how well Sir PTerry does this, but instead I'm going to focus on a real example, one that's a little closer in time and space (and identities have been munged with to protect the guilty).

Someone I know is in the middle of a rather ugly falling out with her family over a whole lot of things that look petty and silly from the outside. From her side, though, there's a very different filter. As she sees things, she's being treated like a child and expected to do and be what everyone else in her family thinks she should do and be. She sees a pattern of put-downs and insults, and that she's only defending herself. A good writer should be able to tell her story and make her sympathetic to readers who would normally think her actions were petty, malicious, and immature. A good writer should be able to do this even when said writer thinks those actions are petty, malicious, and immature.

Which - of course - is where the research comes in. If you can find enough information about how people in Culture X thought and felt about Situation Y, you can put yourself inside their heads and think they way they did, at least for a little while. From such a source comes Pooh-Bah's much prized artistic verisimilitude and spares you the horror of writing what ultimately proves to be a "bald and unconvincing narrative"

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to take any document (yes, anything you can find on Google counts, and yes, it can be a news article. It just has to be a document. No video or audio, please) and try to figure out what that document reveals about the writer's world view. You don't even need to post back what you've found, although I'm sure it will be interesting if you do. Oh, and no using this as an excuse to slam someone for not agreeing with your beliefs. You're supposed to be trying to empathize here.

Writers Workshop Follow-up

In my last post, I mentioned that our own Sarah Hoyt had been in town to conduct a writers workshop. Not only was Sarah her usual entertaining self, but she imparted some great information. Most important of all, she made those who attended think about what it means to be a writer and how far it goes beyond just sitting butt in chair and writing. We're writers, publicists, mail clerks, accountants and chief cook and bottle washers to name a few. However, as Sarah pointed out, one of the most important things we have to do is know who our market is when we're writing a book, not only with regard to what agent or publisher we're trying to "sell" it to but also with regard to who our reading public will be.

Needless to say, that got everyone thinking, most especially those who are writing for the juvenile and young adult readers. In discussions between sessions, the conversation continued, usually between the workshop participants. One thought the only difference was the language used in the books. Another felt that you had to write the situations in a more simplistic style, not only using less challenging vocabulary but also a simpler sentence structure etc., and then a third felt you should only tackle the really difficult social/ethical/moral situations in books set for the "young adult" readers.

What made me think about this particular topic again was a conversation I had at dinner with several librarians the other night. One works at a junior high school library. The other two at the local library in the children's and youth section. We'd been discussing some of the books that have come out over the last few years and the increasing numbers of junior high and high school kids who are reading for pleasure -- and how the summer reading lists have, for years, done their best to derail this whether those putting together the lists mean to or not.

By way of illustration, when my son was entering the sixth grade, he was given a list of fifteen or so books, of which he had to read twelve. The topics of the books, all of which were fiction, ran from drug abuse to abandonment to rape and incest to sports and vacation fun. Well, needless to say, since reading had been used as a punishment by a teacher several years before and my son still had not rediscovered the joy of reading he'd felt before then, we chose to read the "lighter" books first. The problem came when we had to choose one last book to complete the required number. The book we chose seemed innocent enough. From the cover illustration to the inside flap description and even the on-line reviews, it appeared to be nothing more than a nice little gothic ghost story. Perfect for a boy about to go into the sixth grade. Right?

WRONG! Most of the book was exactly that. The author lulled you in with an easy style and lush descriptions that appealed not only to my son but to me. Then, without warning, she yanked the rug out from under you and yelled "Gotcha!". The nice ghost story suddenly had a very graphic attempted rape scene followed by an equally graphic murder scene. There was no rhyme or reason for it being there, and most certainly not for it to be as graphic as it was. For those twenty pages or so, the author forgot her audience and went from writing for middle schoolers to high schoolers and adults.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not advocating denying that bad things happen to people in books written for middle schoolers. What I am advocating is that we keep in mind who we're writing for and write appropriately. Just as I wouldn't expect an author trying to sell an inspirational novel to fill it with f-bombs, I don't expect an author writing for middle schoolers or younger to put in graphic sex scenes or more graphic violence. The key is, read the market. See what is on library and bookstore shelves for that age group. That is part of the research we have to do as authors.

How important do you think it is that authors tackle the "issues" of the day? For you parents out there, do you want the summer reading lists to be filled with books dealing with nothing but the "social issues" or should there be a mix of the "socially relevant" books and those that are just "fun" reads?

The Things Writers Do

Last night I was googling bizarre lethal animals, stinging plants, and weird parasites. Why was this, you ask? (Yes, yes, I know you didn't. Shut up. You're interrupting my rhetorical flight of something or other.)

The short short version - I needed all sorts of interestingly nasty ways to kill people. If there's a forbidden zone chock full of lethal everything, then it's a plot necessity that Ye Writer's characters will need to go either into or through it. If there are other characters with them, it's equally necessary that the other characters die. Unpleasantly, of course. The technical term for this is a writer-cookie, also known - to me at least - as a redshirt-with-extreme-malice (I do take special requests, as my friends know).

It's a very specialized form of writer-voodoo. I snapshot the person I'm going to kill with a little thumbnail portrait, maybe only a line or two, and sometimes a name that's derived from the original's name. Then I kill them in interesting and gruesome ways. Sometimes repeatedly. My manager has been killed twice now, and oddly enough he becomes easier to deal with each time I kill him (No, he has never read anything I've written. No, you can't tell him. It takes all the fun out of it.)

In any case, my forbidden zone was there anyway, there were some fourteen people going to die there anyway, four of them minor characters who readers are hopefully going to care about a little bit, the others servants along for the trip more or less (Yes, it does make more sense than that. No you can't read it yet. I'm still writing it.). It's with the others that I get to have fun and do the redshirt-with-malice thing to people who've managed to irritate me.

Why do I insert people I know who have pissed me off? (No, "piss" is not a rude word where I grew up. It's 'earthy'). It's therapeutic. I get to have fun researching bizarre and horrible ways to die and I get to let off steam by putting someone I'm angry with in the role of Ensign Cannonfodder and writing their horrible death.

The bizarre parasites, biting trees, and other nasties got to be featured because this particular book is set in a far future where the bio-engineered war tools have gone on to reproduce and evolve, assisted by said war putting a very hefty dent in the unmodified human population worldwide. Sites where the biolabs were, or where nuclear weapons were used, are still, centuries later, uninhabitable. And the rest of the world is more or less feudal, but the rulers are the descendants of the saner modified humans. Not surprisingly, they got names that reflected what kind of mythical critter they resembled most, so there are dwarves (short, muscular, able to smell metals and rare earths - optimised for finding and mining deep underground deposits), elves (pretty, charismatic, telepathic, and capable of controlling other people's minds as well as reading them - all very handy for spying), vampires (who absolutely do not sparkle and are more or less one of the less ethical faction's version of elves) and... well. You get the idea.

What this piece looks like - and will probably be marketed as when I get that far - is "epic fantasy with vampires". The war that created them isn't even legend, it's completely lost. The bio-enhancements are regarded as "magic" or "gifts from deity" depending on culture. And of course the forbidden zones are terrible places where evil magic happened so long ago their legends merely hint at it.

The fun part for me is finding workable reasons why someone would have engineered something like this and how a culture where pure humans are very much an inferior race somewhere between animals and "real" people might evolve. I'm going to end up exploring several variations on that evolution as I write the books - which means I've been digging into history, sociology and evolutionary theory as well, although it lacks the 'cool' factor of bizarre lethal plants and animals.

In all probability the only part of the research that will be visible in the finished book will be the forbidden zone stuff. I made a deliberate choice to avoid the standards like giant spiders, and go for the kinds of nasties that aren't all that common. Things like the tree whose leaves are covered with microscopic silicon needles that release a neurotoxin painful enough to kill (Rowena, Chris, you've probably heard about the Gympie Stinging Tree) and whose shed needles stay actively toxic for at least 100 years. Or the bird whose feathers and beak are coated with the same basic poison the poison dart frogs secrete (A New Guinea native bird).

As I've learned - repeatedly - from the virtual "PTerry was here" signs all over odd branches of history, you don't need to make this stuff up. It's already out there. Two of my big writer-cookies are finding the stuff, and making it happen to someone who's got on my nerve (I only have one, and it's rather sensitive).

What are your writer-cookies? And what are the things you do when you write just because you like it?

It ain't necessarily so

It's what you know that ain't so that bites you. There is a rather sad example of this on Baen's Bar right now, but rather than embarrass the culprit I'm going to tell a few tales against myself instead. I figure after I subbed for Sarah yesterday, she being somewhere in Portugal right now, you didn't need pointless pontification from the pulpit (actually it's a soapbox, and I'm sure it escaped from Terry Pratchett because it has lots of little legs and it just keeps ambushing me).

Anyway, writers need to keep an open mind because what we write gets to all kinds of people, and a lot of them get upset when we make a mistake with something they're very familiar with. This is where that big time-sink known as research comes in. There's just one problem. You know to research things you know nothing, or very little about. But how do you find the things where you think you know it but you really don't?

Google is your friend. So is listening to and reading just about everything - and being willing to re-evaluate what you think at any time. Take me (actually, don't. My husband would be a little unhappy about that). One of my more interesting exploits was a 1500 mile drive with a broken right ankle. How did I manage that?

To start with, I didn't realize it was broken. After all, you can't walk if you've broken anything more serious than a toe, right?

Yes, you can. The position of the foot has to be exactly right, and it certainly doesn't work for every broken limb, but there are times when you can actually put weight on a broken ankle, and walk. Well, hobble. And yes, drive.

It does hurt. Rather a lot, I might add. And that's another one I thought I knew and it weren't so - extreme pain does not necessarily cause screaming. In my cause it mostly caused whimpering, but I could still function, more or less. Towards the end of the drive - it was a 2.5 day trip - I was pretty much mono-focused and on a double-dose of painkiller to stay more or less functional, but I was still on my feet. Yes, including the broken one, which by this stage had reached something more than twice the usual size, attained a truly spectacular range of color in the blue, black, and purple range, and was blistering the skin.

When the pain stopped - thank you IV painkillers - I went to sleep, which was another what I knew what ain't so. I hadn't realized until then just how exhausting prolonged pain can be, and how the first reaction when it stops is to pass out because up until then you hurt too much for that. Of course by this time I had Emergency Room nurses telling me they'd personally come and kill me if I put any weight on that foot before an orthopedic surgeon said I could (something like that, anyway. I was a bit hazy, for some reason).

When I was doing research on trauma injury for a work in progress and stumbled across this site, I read through all two thousand plus on-topic posts half in horrified fascination, and half because I expected to see my broken ankle there. I recommend it for anyone who's interested in the many and bizarre ways people injure themselves, and what they do afterwards. Fair warning: sometimes it's spray worthy, and others kind of gross. It's very educational. If the experiences of American city ER staff are any guide, the most dangerous occupation in urban USA is "standing on the corner, minding my own business". And watch out for "some guy" or "that dude". They're trouble. Reading your Bible increases the risk factor.

The point here, of course, is that if you don't go looking even for the things you think you know, you might get smacked with them later. Hopefully not in quite such a vivid and painful way as I learned about walking on a broken ankle, but usually the experience isn't fun. There's nothing quite so deflating as the person two rows back loudly telling everyone that he's a professional horseman and what you describe on page X is physically impossible because horse's legs don't bend that way. (No, this hasn't happened to me. Yet. I'm hoping to avoid this fate).

What are some of the ways what you thought you knew has smacked you in the face? Feel free to conceal names to protect the guilty.

Grave Ruminations

Hi, I'm Pati Nagle, your alternate Gal Friday. I write mostly fantasy with some science fiction here and there and oh, yeah—historical fiction under my alter ego, P.G. Nagle. It's an honor to be included in the Mad Genius Club, among such august company. Or should I say October company?

I'm delighted to make my debut on Halloween, as it's my all-time favorite holiday. Since we're talking about process here, and in honor of the day, I thought I'd share some pictures from my recent visit to St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 in New Orleans. Take a stroll among the tombs with me while I muse about writing and inspiration.

My love of the fantastic goes back to my childhood, and Halloween has always been a big part of it. As a kid I loved planning my costume every year, dressing up and running around the neighborhood, the whisper of snow in the air, the dark shapes of other kids haunting the streets. All that was far better than the candy.

As an adult I love handing out candy to cute kids, seeing their costumes, carving pumpkins and lighting candles, decorating the house, and just reveling in the change of seasons. I also love the traditions of Dia de los Muertos, which is widely celebrated in the Southwest.

In New Orleans, the same celebrations are held under the name of All Saints' Day. I've been to this fascinating city numerous times, for both writing conferences and research for my novels. This trip was for pleasure but inevitably I did things that can be considered research, including taking a graveyard tour. At the moment I'm not working on a specific project involving a cemetery, but who knows? It's possible that just walking around a place like this will inspire a story.

That's a fiction writer's reality. Always soaking up information, never knowing what will bubble up to the surface later and appear in a novel. This is as much a part of the process as sitting down in front of the computer, at least for me.

As I was going through these photos, even though I took them only a couple of weeks ago, I noticed details that I hadn't registered during the tour. Like the fact that most of the tombs in the first picture above are marble, and most of the tombs in the second one are brick. Other than that, the photos are similar, kind of a nice matched pair. Maybe these two "streets" could be home to two rival clans of vampires.

See what I mean? Anything could come out of this. My answer to people who ask where I get my ideas is, everywhere.

My camera has been my trusty research tool for as long as I've been publishing. I never know what I'm going to wish I had recorded later, so I take lots of pictures whenever I'm someplace interesting. (Whoever invented digital photography, bless you.)

As I was walking through the cemetery, listening to the tour guide, my brain was gathering information on a lot of different levels. The camera is the brain's auxiliary, capturing far more visual detail than I can remember. Consciously, I was mostly grabbing at impressions. Oo, that looks cool—take a picture. Interesting anecdote—take a picture. And while I'm soaking up images, the brain is asking questions.

Which of these two tombs is the real burial place of Marie Leveau—or does it matter? Was she buried somewhere else altogether? Both of these tombs are visited by hundreds of people a year, who mark the tombs with three "x"s and leave offerings to Madame Leveau, hoping she will grant their wishes. She has become a something of a voodoo goddess. Our guide was skeptical about her being in either tomb.

Is there a way to do DNA testing on the tombs' contents to prove whether she's there? Probably not, is the answer to that one. The dessication of remains in these tombs is pretty thorough due to the heat of the tropical climate. (Our guide compared it to baking a turkey in a 120 degree oven for a year.) Even if a useful bit of bone were found, it could belong to any of the family members whose remains are in the tomb. The whole process of storing remains in these cemeteries is fascinating (and, as our guide pointed out, environmentally sound—a very efficient system).

There's one more thing about excursions. Not only do I collect information on them, but I also soak up atmosphere. Even in the daytime, this cemetery has a distinctive feeling. (Note: it's locked up at night, and it's dangerous to visit alone, because of predatory criminals. If you visit, go with a tour. You'll be safer and get a lot more out of it.)

This is a place of reverence and respect for ancestors, but at the same time a place of decay. Tombs with long lists of names carved in marble stand beside tombs where no markings have survived, and whose occupants are no longer known. Remembrance and the forgotten, side by side.

Note the Mardi Gras beads hanging on the ironwork around these tombs. How does that make you react? Does it seem disrespectful, or is it an uplifting expression of joie de vivre in a place of death?

Who might have put those beads there, and why? What would the tombs' occupants think of such tribute? Here's where I start thinking about characters, situations, events. These are the bricks (or marble blocks) from which stories are built.

I ask a lot of questions on research excursions, most of which don't get answered at the time. All of it is fodder for the writing.


—Pati Nagle