How Writing a Novel is Like Finding a Woolly Mammoth in Your Back Yard, or The Writer as Archeologist.

I adore Sybil's entry, below, on the joys and fascinations of the research an author does.

A few years ago I read about a soybean farmer in Michigan who was digging around on his property when he found something that he thought was a buried fence post. He tried to dig it out, but discovered it was much bigger than a fence post, and attached to something. He kept digging, and lo and behold, after much toil he discovered that his fence post was actually a tusk attached to a skull. He called in the archeologists, who discovered that the skull was part of the skeleton of a huge woolly mammoth that had been butchered and stored in a pond some one hundred and fifty thousand years earlier by prehistoric hunters. 

Now, that is quite a discovery, to go from a hole in the ground, to a fence post, to the tale of early American mammoth hunters, butchering their prey after a successful and thrilling hunt and then sinking the carcass into a pond to keep it fresh for a while longer. Why did they not retrieve it later? Did they move on? Millennia later, a scientist holds a bone in his hand and wonders.

In related news, I’ve been working on the first draft of a new novel. My fourteenth, something totally different than anything I have ever done. (Working title: Number Fourteen) Believe me, I have been digging and researching like crazy because this is a whole new excavation. 

Every time I begin a new book, I survey the landscape until I find a likely place to hunt for a tale worth telling. Then I haul out my tools and I start digging, trying to find the gist of the story. At first I tend to slog around, flinging shovels full of mud out of the way, occasionally coming up with promising bits and pieces of bone, but nothing that excites me. Until I just happen to hit upon something that is different from all the mud I have been digging into. Often I think I’ve just found a fence post, but as I continue to dig, my author eye tells me that I have stumbled upon something that is going to be interesting. Then my heart rate picks up because I realize that what I’ve found is made of gold, and if I keep carefully digging, then scooping, then delicately brushing away the detritus around the story, I will have discovered a tale worth telling.

ALWAYS ask questions

by Rick Blechta

This weekend I was in the middle of a chapter and came to a roadblock, or maybe it’s better to put it that I came to a point where the scene could take one direction or another. The conundrum I faced was this: if I took path A, I would need to acquire a good bit of very specific knowledge. Path B wouldn’t require anything I didn’t already know. It also seemed to me in thinking on this that path A might be more interesting in the end and certainly be less “ordinary.” Question was: did I want to spend the time going out and getting this information? I wasn’t even sure if any of this stuff would make it into the final version at that point.

Here’s the real rub: I could have had all that information around five years ago. A friend is involved in that business (computer surveillance) at a very high end. I could tell you exactly what the business involved, but then I’d have to kill you. Suffice it to say my friend works for a government organization.

We were just having a good bull session and I asked a question. “Well, I guess I could tell you about this in a general way. Wanna know?” For some reason I don’t understand — since I’m a very curious person by nature — I told my friend no. That was okay. And our discussion moved on to other topics.

Now I needed that information, or something very close to it, and I didn’t have it. At the time I was speaking with my friend it didn’t seem very important to know and there were other things I wanted to discuss. I can no longer remember what those items were. The path our conversation might have taken was the one that was now critical to my writing. Had I but said, “Yes. Tell me all about it,” I would be done with that scene and maybe have something really good.

I took path B in the end, not wanting to be slowed down by research. I’ve lost touch with my friend and it might take some time to get in touch again. We hadn’t spoken since that night.

Had I but known! When information falls into your lap — or looks as if it might — follow your nose. Who knows when it might become valuable?

Never Waste a Good Story

Aline’s entry from Monday concerning the ethics of using a third party’s actual life experience as a plot line, plus last weekend’s guest entry by Leslie Dana Kirby about how her debut novel was inspired by the O.J. Simpson case, brought to mind an entry I (Donis) did on a similar theme several years ago on this very site. I use real events, both historical and personal, all the time in my books. When I use personal events, I either disguise them or ask permission of the individual to whom it happened. I do have the writer’s mind, though, and when I hear an intriguing story, I do not forget it, and like Aline, I ponder long and hard on how I can use it in a book. Sometimes I ponder long and hard for decades, as I noted in this entry from 2011:

My third novel, The Drop Edge of Yonder,  was thirty years in the making. There are at least two pivotal scenes in the book that owe their existence to newspaper articles that stayed with me all that time. I read the first story when I lived in Lubbock, Texas, back in the ’70′s. Two women, an elderly mother and her grown daughter, were out shopping together, walking down the street and minding their own business, when a crazy person ran up and attacked the daughter out of the blue. The old mother saved her daughter when she jumped on the crazy man’s back and pummeled him and bit on him and basically beat the heck out of him.

Somewhere around the same time, I read an interview with an old British soldier who had fought the Massoud in Palestine after WWII. He described a fighter who came at him tooth and claw and absolutely refused to be killed, even after he shot him and stabbed him and beat him with the butt of his rifle. The fighter finally sunk his teeth in the soldier’s foot and the soldier had to decapitate him to make him let go. The soldier said it was the scariest thing that had ever happened to him in his life. I took both these images and put them together to create one of the climatic scenes of the book.

The opening scene of Drop Edge isn’t quite as old an image in my head as the other two, but it is also a tale that took me a long time to tell. Seven or eight years before I began writing that particular book, I did a family genealogy for my sibs for Christmas, which as you regular Dear Readers may know, is one of the things that inspired me to write my Alafair Tucker series in the first place . One of the things I learned while doing research on my family was the story of one of my a great-great grandfathers and three of his companions who were returning from the Civil War Battle of Pea Ridge when they stopped a few miles from home to rob a bee hive in a tree. While they were smoking the hive, they were ambushed by bushwhackers and killed. They were found by their families a few hours later but lay dead in the field over night, guarded from wild animals by their wives until morning, when they were buried where they fell.

(p.s. the following was also included in the same 2011 blog entry—I repost it now because it is five years later and the high school reunion is about to recur, and now it is not just depressing, it’s unbelievably depressing) On another topic, I recently received an invitation to a depressingly high-numbered high school reunion coming up in October. I graduated from Nathan Hale High in Tulsa in a class of nearly 700 people. (Nathan Hale is the guy who, while about to be hanged by the British as a spy during the American Revolution, said, “I regret that I have but one life to give for my country,” which I always thought was one of history’s great instances of bravado in the face of death. If it had been me, I might have done my patriotic duty like Nathan did, but when it came time to die, my last words would have been along the lines of , “For the love of God, please don’t hang me.” Of course, nobody would have named a high school after me, either.)

The things we do for art

Barbara here, and in case you don't know, that's something of a miracle. A week ago, my continued existence was in some doubt. Not because I had some dreadful disease or was planning to enter the Indie 500, but because I was going winter camping. In Northern Ontario, during the last two weeks of January, statistically the coldest period in the northern hemisphere. This latter fact only occurred to me once I had registered for the trip and paid my money.

As a writer, I am always trying for realism, accuracy, and vivid description. I don't want readers to be yanked out of my stories by the outraged thought 'that's ridiculous!' or 'that's not what it's like!' My next book is set in the Laurentian Mountains north of Montreal, on a camping/ skiing expedition in the middle of winter, and at some point in balmy September, immersed the early pages of the first draft, I thought "well, I can't possibly write about winter camping without experiencing it". Without hearing the wolf howls at night and the squeak of boots on frozen snow, without feeling the bone-chilling cold of the ground beneath my sleeping bag and the frost on my nose, without seeing how the die-hard lovers of the great winter outdoors cope with stoves and tents and cooking (not to mention latrines, which I plan to give only passing mention in the book).

So I decided to try it myself. How hard could it be? I'm a fit, adventurous, essentially upbeat soul who is prepared to try most things once in the interests of sampling life. There are few things I won't consider. Eating cockroaches. swimming with sharks, and playing with snakes are among those few. But I love the great outdoors, I love camping, I love crisp, fluffy snow. It will be fun!

So I researched winter camping adventure companies, found one that sounded perfect for my needs, and paid my money. I spent half of December and January combing the sales in an attempt to get at least some of the gear the outfitter recommended. How many times will I use  -20 degree sleeping bag? Or camp booties? Or anoraks? So I opted to rent some of the gear from the outfitter to save costs and ensure the right gear. And last week, with the dogs in the kennel and our duffel bags packed, my friend and I set off. The temperature, which had been ridiculously warm since November, suddenly plunged, and we found ourselves hiking eight kilometres in to the base camp in -20 sunshine.

The base camp reminded me of girl guide camp from nearly sixty years ago– a canvas tent set on a wooden platform with a stove and wooden bunkbeds inside. We met the rest of the intrepid tour members and we had a delicious meal of chill cooked on the wood stove. First note to writing self– one-pot dinners are best, and make sure everyone has one bowl and one utensil (a spoon). Saves on clean-up. That night the temperature plunged below -30 and we froze, giving me a vivid sense of frozen noses.  I won't even mention the mid-night latrine excursions, on this night or any of the subsequent ones. Some things are too much detail for readers.

The next day, hauling our toboggans, we trekked on snowshoe out to a new campsite at the base of the mountain we were to climb. I learned a lot about ragged breathing, aching thighs, soaring eagles, wolf and deer tracks, long, blinding expanses of frozen lake, and the sheer relief of arriving. I learned about putting up tents, spreading fir boughs as bedding, collecting water and firewood, and pulling together. I learned the closeness that forms among strangers gathered around a wood stove to share food, drink, and laughter at the end of an exhausting day.

That night I learned that you can dry wet mittens and moccasins from strings in the tent, and when you're tired enough, you can fall asleep on the frozen ground with nothing but fir boughs as padding. The next day we climbed a mountain on snowshoes and stood at the top, triumphant, looking south over Lake Huron. By then I had forgotten that this was a research trip, not a journey of self-discovery, and I had to remind myself to ask questions and take pictures. I hadn't even opened my notebook. Flickering candlelight is a poor source of light for these aging eyes anyway.

When I returned to civilization four days later, I had learned a great deal that will find its way into my new book, but I had learned much more about myself. About my limits, my strengths, and my capacity for joy and adventure. That's the cool thing about this writing life. It leads us into places and on adventures that we would never have imagined, and we are the richer for it. I am thinking I will pick some place totally different for my next book.

Costa Rica, perhaps. Or Hawaii. After all, it's such a big, fascinating world out there.

How Much Research is Enough?

As I, Donis, mentioned a couple of weeks ago, I’ve just begun a new novel, and I must say that though I have been working my little tail off lately, I haven’t written very much on the actual story. I’ve been doing research.

The series that I’m writing now is historical, so there is always a certain amount of research that must be done, but every single time I start a new book I end up wrestling with the question of how much research is too dang much. I mean, eventually you have to write the book.

I keep telling myself that it isn’t necessary to do so much research that I become the world’s foremost expert on my subject. Right now I’m researching realistic and historically accurate ways to kill people. This is always problematic for me. Sadly, I have reached such a state of paranoia that I am a little bit afraid to do murderous research on my home computer, lest the NSA bust down my door in the middle of the night. Once I I spent many hours doing anonymous research on library computers because wanted to discover exactly how oil field workers used nitroglycerin to clear obstructions from a well. I am writing murder mystery, after all, and I thought that blowing someone to hell with nitro seemed like a colorful way to commit murder.

I really want to give my reader a true experience of the time and place I write about. I want you to know what it was like to live in southeastern Oklahoma during the flu epidemic of 1918. I want to be accurate, but in the end, I’m writing fiction, not history. Less is almost always more. It’s way too easy to overwrite. You don’t need to explain everything (which I have been guilty of doing.) Even so, that doesn’t mean I can play fast and loose with the facts. One thing I absolutely do not want to do is take the reader out of the story by writing something so obviously anachronistic that she stops and says, “What the …?”

Many years ago a woman told me about a movie she had seen in which an aspiring author walks into a publishing house with a manuscript in hand and asks to see an editor. He gets right in. The editor says, “sure, leave your manuscript with me and come back tomorrow.” The very next morning, the author returns to find that the editor has read the book overnight and loved it. He gives the author a check and tells him that his book will be on the shelves in two weeks.

What? What is this? The Nicholas Tesla Time Warp Publishing House? Their motto is Publishing Faster Than the Speed of Light. I want this publisher.

A lot of people who saw that movie didn’t know or care that that scenario is wrong, but we writers know it’s not only wrong, it’s ridiculous. I remember that story when I’m tempted to think that most of my readers know nothing about Oklahoma in 1918, so I can fudge a little. Somebody knows the truth, and believe me, they’ll let you know when you’ve got it wrong.

Usually history is not front and center in a historical novel. In novels of any ilk, I think it’s the characters that make the story. Walter Mosely said, “Fiction is a collusion between the reader and the novel. Your readers will go along with you, creating a much larger world as they do. It won’t be exactly the world you intended them to see, but it will be close enough—sometimes it will be better”.

The joys of research

I’m at sixes and sevens over what to write today for my weekly posting.

When I wrote that first sentence, I realized that this was a phrase I've heard numerous times over the years and yet I had no clear meaning about what it actually means (“the dictionary definition”, as it were) nor from where it came. Time for the Internet to come to my rescue.

I'll leave it to you to look up if you wish (start with Chaucer), but the process is called research, and for me, it one of the joys of doing anything of an intellectual nature.

It's also an absolutely perfect day here in southern Ontario, coolish, bit of a breeze, nice blue sky, the picture postcard of a lovely summer day.

Put together, I thought of some of my past research trips for the novels I’ve written. Being in a storytelling mood, maybe a good post would be to describe one of the more memorable ones.

This took place in March 1996 in Vienna. My wife, assistant, travel companion and translator Vicki and I were visiting the Schönbrunn Palace which was the Habsburg’s quaint, little “summer residence” – all 1441 rooms of it.

Yeah, we were there partly to do a bit of sightseeing, because its rococo splendour is really something to behold. But it was also part of my research for Cemetery of the Nameless — a title that was “given” to me by a Viennese gendarme (but that’s another story for another post). What I was looking for was a location for the novel's climatic scene. Before traveling to Vienna, I had been thinking of using the Vienna Phil’s concert hall in the Musikverein. A quick visit there showed me it wasn’t suitable.

What to do?

Time to pull out our Baedeker Guide and find something more suitable. (Never travel without Baedeker, I always say.) I remember being immediately intrigued by the fact the emperor of Austria's cottage boasted 1441 rooms.

The palace — let's call it what it is, okay? — is truly spectacular. As we traveled through it, our jaws on the floor, I noticed a security guard coming out of a door hidden in a wall. What’s back there? I thought.

So I asked a guard (with Vicki’s help since her German is pretty decent) and he told us, “The servant’s hallways and rooms.” Of course the Emperor, his family and guests wouldn't want to see such mundane things as linen closets, kitchens and storage rooms, so they built these things out of sight in the centre of the building or between the “official rooms”.

“How do we get back there?”

“It is closed to the public.”

“Who could I speak to about it?”

“Herr Direktor, I suppose,” the guard answered, “but he will not allow you entry.”

With directions how to find the Direktor's offices in the basement, off we headed. You see, traveling through the Empress Elisabeth’s private bedroom, I’d spotted something intriguing, something where you might hide a great treasure and where you could be assured no one would look. And this was just what the ending of my novel revolved around. It was just (possibly) too perfect.

If I could only get back into the servant’s area. The way I had it figured, the worst I could be told was to get out. It wouldn't hurt to at least try.

We got to the Direktor’s office and I gave his secretary my calling card — something quite distinct from the usual business card, and something I'd been told to carry, so I'd made up a couple of dozen before leaving home. I explained to her what I would like permission to do. She disappeared into the Direktor’s office with my card, and came out a few moments later. “Sit here. Herr Direktor will see you in a few minutes.”

Maybe I was in? Ten minutes later, we were seated in his office again explaining that I was writing a crime novel set in Vienna and the climax of it might well be behind the walls of the Schönbrunn. I was flipping my calling card in his fingers while I spoke. Finally, he jumped to his feet, retrieved a huge ring of keys from a closet, and said, “Off we go!”

For the next hour we got a personal, literally behind-the-scenes look at this huge building. He was a delightful tour guide with an encyclopedic knowledge of the building and its history.

And miraculously, that is how I got exactly what I needed to build a really amazing climactic scene for Cemetery.

I can’t tell you what it was. You’ll just have to read the novel.