You Really Can't Do Too Much Research For Your Book

One of the major appeals of writing fiction is the idea that if you don't know the answer to something that you can just make it up. Not sure how light is focused into a beam that fires from the tip of your futuristic private eye's laser pistol? Good news, you can just create the mystery element of the Forunex crystal that makes light-based weaponry practical and compact. Unsure of how spontaneous combustion would be possible from a physics and chemistry standpoint? Well, since the Devotees of Fire are granted power by their god, it's magic so you don't have to explain a damn thing!

It can really make your life as a creator easier in a lot of respects.

In other respects, though...

A problem that a lot of writers run into, though, is they get too drunk on their own creative abilities. Just because something is fictional, that doesn't mean you shouldn't at least do a Google search, or crack a book, to make sure you aren't going in the completely wrong direction.

 

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Let's Look at Werewolves For a Second

Oh yeah, we're going to fight about this.

If you've ever read a piece of werewolf fiction, or even played a game like Werewolf: The Apocalypse, you're likely very familiar with the idea of strong alpha leaders, the right hand of the beta, and the shifty omega no one likes. These are terms and ideas that are used to describe the structure of wolf packs, thereby allowing the reader to have one foot in reality, and one foot in a fantasy.

Unless they've read a science article since roughly 1980 or so.

As Knowledge Nuts points out, the idea of violent struggles for dominance is what you see in captive wolf packs. When wolves have no relation to one another, and no existing family structure, which means these wolves were basically in animal prison. In the wild wolves act nothing like this. They're tight-knit family groups that care for one another, and a wolf's age is a far more likely indicator of status than how violent or aggressive they are. So trying to map the social dynamic of a violent prison gang onto all werewolves actually undercuts your attempt to bridge reality with fiction if the reader is aware you're citing debunked, outdated ideas in the story.

This is just a small example of how you need to make sure your research impacts the fiction you're creating. And the more closely tied to reality your fantasy is, the more research you need to do. Because if your central conceit is, "I have giant robots in my story," then you can probably just ask your audience to buy that without going into too many details of the physics or how these huge machines function. But if your story is set in a near-future Moscow, then it would probably help to actually research the culture of the country, the function of the government, and the ranks of the armed forces to make sure you get those things correct. Especially if your robot's pilot would have to complete regular military training, and then meet the standards of that country before being allowed into the heavy armored division.

You Can Never Know Too Much

While it's possible to go overboard on description and detail, and to bog your book down with adverbs or purple prose, you can never do too much research as a creator. Because even if you find a bunch of details that aren't going to be relevant to your story, they're still going to inform your view and your process. Whether it's how many samurai were actually women, to what the code of chivalry actually demanded from knights, to what gender roles were actually held by the Vikings (with men being beautiful and perfumed, and women being the heads of the household's finances), these little factoids can take your book in unexpected directions.

Additionally, a little extra research can often stop you from including debunked facts, outdated worldviews, or offensive stereotypes in your stories... and that's worth a little extra time hitting the books, don't you think?

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That's all for this week's Craft of Writing! For more of my work, check out my Vocal archive, or at My Amazon Author Page where you can find books like my cat noir novel Marked Territory, my sword and sorcery novel Crier's Knife, or my most recent short story collection The Rejects!

 

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