Tag: research

Film and Television Aren’t Your Friends

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There are a few things — more than a few, actually, but this is a blog post, not an exhaustive list — that you’re going to get the wrong impression of, if you’re relying on film and television and not real life:

How dark darkness really is.  Scenes on television and in the movies that are supposedly set in lightless or minimally-lit places (the woods on a moonless night; a windowless room) are in fact taking place in a representation of darkness and not the real thing, and the representation has to have enough light going on that the viewers can follow the action.  You’re a writer, not a film or television director, so you don’t have access to that particular artistic convention.  You need to keep track of what your light sources are, and if you don’t want your characters to be tripping over furniture in the dark, have them remember to bring along a flashlight.

How much injury it actually takes to put somebody out of action.  If all you want to do is sideline a character for a few chapters so that, for example, other characters are temporarily deprived of their assistance, it’s not necessary to riddle them with bullets or put them in a coma.  A severe sprain, a minor dislocation, a bad case of flu or even food poisoning . . . any of those will work as well.

How loud gunshots really are.  Make that how LOUD.  Your characters aren’t going to be holding any complex conversations in the immediate aftermath.

At what speed the wheels of justice really turn.  Anybody who’s ever served on jury duty knows that the reality is a long way from its fictional counterpart.  There are fewer moments of high drama, and more moments that sound like a couple of highly-paid professional litigators playing a complex but boring game of Mother-may-I.  (If you’ve never served on a jury, do so if you’re called — the experience, for a writer, is invaluable.  Lacking that opportunity, you can sometimes find gavel-to-gavel trial coverage on television or the internet.)

The moral of the story, unsurprisingly, is that if you find yourself writing about something that you only know about through media representations . . . back off and do some research.

Shiny Internet Stuff

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Writers are intellectual packrats.    Set one down in a used book store or a library sale, and he or she is likely to come away with a history of carrier pigeons in World War I, a Peruvian vegetarian cookbook (in Spanish), and five non-consecutive volumes of The Bobbsey Twins . . . all on the grounds that “they might come in handy someday.”

Their browser bookmark lists are equally eclectic — you never know, after all, what information you might turn out to need.  Today’s interesting find:  a YouTube video by a woman whose passion is historical-recreationist hairdressing; in this one, she first dissects and then re-creates the complex seven-braid hairstyle of the Roman Vestal Virgins (and Roman brides, but they only had to wear it for one day instead of all the time.)

She doesn’t speculate on the maintenance of the hairstyle — and it’s not the sort of thing that the ancient Roman primary sources, being written by men, would have bothered to talk, or even think, about — but just from looking at the way the hair was first braided and then put up, I’d guess that the multiple braids were done once or twice a month (or week, or whatever — I’m not an expert on braid-care), and then the style itself was put up in the morning and taken down again at night.

A Truth Universally Acknowledged

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Thanksgiving dinner is essentially a Pie Delivery System.

This year we’re having apple streusel, cherry streusel, and pumpkin.

Things I’m thankful for, as a writer:

Word processing technology, because it hands over most of the mechanical drudgery to mechanical drudges.

The internet, and in particular the web, because it lets me do research without having to travel many miles over hedges and stiles in order to be physically present in the same room as the text, or on the same hillside as the view.

Editors, because they work to make my books not just better, but as good as possible.

Publishers, because they do all the hard work of production and distribution so I don’t have to.

And readers, because without them I’d just be talking to an empty room.

Have a happy Thanksgiving, if you’re celebrating; and have a good day anyhow, if you’re not.

Plot Device Obsolescence

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Technology changes all the time, and writers have to keep up with it.  This need for change doesn’t just affect our tools and our paths to publication — every so often a change comes along that wipes out or revises entire categories of plot devices and developments.

There was a time when characters could leave town, or leave the country, and effectively drop off the edge of the world as far as the folks back home were concerned.  Twenty miles was a long way, a hundred miles was even longer, and across the ocean (or the continent) was gone-for-good-and-never-seen-again.  Which was good for sad plots, with lost true loves and all, and good for suspenseful plots, with mysteriously returning missing heirs, and good for providing characters in need of escape with a place to go.

Then transportation got faster, and we got the telegraph and the telephone and the transAtlantic cable, and writers had to deal with the fact that it was now a lot easier for their characters to stay in touch, and a lot harder for them to hide.

The status quo rattled along for a few decades, as far as plots and technology went.  There were a lot of technological advances, but most of them weren’t in areas that would require massive retooling of existing plot machinery.  Even personal computers opened up more plot possibilities than they closed off.

Then along came cell phones and social media.  All of a sudden, it became a lot harder for writers to put their characters in that state of fear and isolation that’s so productive of interesting plot developments.  So long as your protagonist has a cell phone — and your readers will assume that he or she does have one — then at least in theory help is just a phone call away.  If you want your character to be truly alone and forced to rely only on his or her own resources, you’re going to have to deal with the cell phone problem:  lose it, leave it behind, drain its battery, break it, or make sure your readers know in advance that the character’s potential location has cell phone dead areas.  (They do still exist, especially in rural or wilderness areas; and even in cities there are some places where reception is at best spotty.)

It’s enough to make a writer turn to historical fiction, it is.  Just don’t turn to near-past historical fiction, because then you’re stuck with figuring out the point at which — for example — cell phones went from becoming large, expensive, and rare to being small, cheap, and ubiquitous.  (At some point during the run of The X-Files, is my guess; check out the differences between the phones Mulder and Scully use in the first couple of season with the ones they were using by the end.)

Another Item from the Department of Nifty Stuff

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More research gold — the Metropolitan Museum of Art has put a bunch of its publications up on the ‘net for on-line reading, PDF download, or print-on-demand.

All sorts of books are available: titles like The Armored Horse in Europe, 1480–1620 or Cochineal Red: The Art History of a Color or History of Russian Costume from the Eleventh to the Twentieth Century, to name just a few.

Man, I love the internet.  Time was, you’d have to go hit a major research library (if not travel all the way to New York) to get some of this stuff.

Uphill.  In the snow.  Both ways.

You Find All Sorts of Things on the Internet

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Especially when you’re doing research.

Some of the odder and/or more interesting (and even sometimes useful) places I’ve found in the course of doing research for different projects:

An Enigma Machine simulator.

A Vest Pocket Guide to Brothels in 19th-Century New York.

A timeline of historic food prices.  With a collection of links to historic menus.

A page for converting dates to and from the French Revolutionary Calendar.  (If you’re curious, today is Décade I, Decadi de Brumaire de l’Année CCXXI de la Revolution.)

One of many online date-of-Easter calculators, in case you want to know what date Easter is going to fall on in the year 2525.  (April 15th, by the Gregorian calendar, for the Western churches.)

An on-line text of Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management.

No wonder research is so dangerous . . . you can fall into it and never come out.

Buried Treasure

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Literally.  A pair of hobbyists with a metal detector recently discovered an Iron Age silver hoard in Denmark:

http://www.roskildemuseum.dk/Default.aspx?ID=651

The page is in Danish, but the pictures are more or less self-explanatory.

You have to understand, I’m the sort of person who considered the highlight of a visit to the British Museum to be the room with the Sutton Hoo treasures, and when the news broke back in ’09 about the discovery of the Staffordshire Hoard, I experienced a moment of sheer fannish delight.  (High-pitched noises of glee may have been involved.)

What does all this have to do with writing?  Not all that much, directly; but for me, at least, it’s all part of the furniture of my mind, the things that enticed me into medieval studies, and into fantasy as well.  As I commented once to a friend about the Sutton Hoo artifacts, “This is the stuff that dragons drool over.”

It’s Different in the Real World

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Or, more reasons why in-person research is still important.  Some things just aren’t the way they look or sound on television and in the movies.

For example — explosions.  Black powder explosions (which is what you’ll be  getting with just about anything pre-dynamite, which is to say 1867) don’t go up in a blaze of flame like they do on television.  And they don’t go bang! either, they go whump! — a really loud, earthshaking whump!  When the gunpowder factory in our town blew up, the force of the explosion was enough to shake the car I was riding in, several blocks away. (The first thing I thought was, “Oh, no, the transmission’s fallen out again!”, which says more about the bad luck we’d had with our previous vehicle than anything else.)

Artillery, now . . . artillery makes a noise more like pom!, and distant artillery really does sound like thunder.  And musket fire rattles like a string of firecrackers going off.  It also fills the air with white smoke — the classic “fog of war”.  (I spent an enlightening afternoon, once, at a Revolutionary War re-enactment.  Being a writer, I took lots of mental notes.  If you’re doing anything historical, re-enactors can be a useful resource for hands-on look-and-feel stuff.)

And if your characters aren’t wearing ear protection, it’s going to be a while before they can have a conversation that isn’t mostly shouting and hand gestures.  That long talk full of angst and conscience-searching will have to be deferred until later.

Let There be Light

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I’d file this one under “common errors of fantasy”, except that it’s more ubiquitous than that.  Call it a common failure of visualization, maybe.

The thing is, no matter where your scene is set, the light is going to be coming from somewhere . . . and a lot of beginning writers forget that you need to keep track of such things.  If the action is taking place outdoors in broad daylight, or indoors during the modern era, illumination can be more or less assumed.  The reader will need to know if something happens to make the light diminish or go away — power failure, dense cloud cover, a darkness at noon of biblical proportions — but unless there’s something special about the source or quality of the light, it doesn’t need to be mentioned.

Outside of those circumstances, though, things change.  If the characters are operating at night, or underground, or in deep woods, or indoors during any pre-electric era, then you-the-writer are going to have to be aware of how much or how little light there is available for every scene.  A cloudy night, a clear night in the dark of the moon, and a clear night with a full moon are going to have different light levels — enough to make the difference, for instance, between your characters being able to operate unseen (if they can avoid tripping over tree roots and large rocks) and being plainly visible to any alert sentry on the castle wall.

Meanwhile, inside the castle, the wizard perusing his books of lore by the flame of a single candle isn’t going to have all that much light to work with either.  As a writing experiment, try lighting one candle in a dark room and then describing how much you can and can’t see.  If you’ve got access to an oil lamp, try that sometime.  Life without incandescence or fluorescence looks a lot different.  (And it’s no wonder that the reading-light spell is a classic beginning wizard’s trick in so many fantasies, right after the fire-lighting one.)

And if your characters are going exploring someplace where they’ll need to take their light source with them, don’t forget that someone in the group is going to have to be carrying the torch or candle or lantern, and that person won’t have both hands free to do other things.

The Research Thing Again

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Yesterday I brought up the necessity of doing research for fantasy novels.  So the question then arises:  If you’re making up everything including the world and the cultures that people it, where do you go for research and what do you do research on?

Well, if you’re doing high fantasy or sword-and-sorcery or anything set in a pre-industrial world, then you need to do some reading on pre-industrial societies in general.  The easy way out is to take one particular society and base yours on that one, with perhaps a certain amount of cosmetic removal of the obvious serial numbers.  But as Murphy’s Laws of Combat remind us, “The easy way is always mined.”  In this case, the minefield is labeled “cultural appropriation”, and you want to avoid it — even if you don’t care about the ethical issues involved, it’s still bad art.  Better in the long run to do enough reading and research that you’re able to make stuff up without having to steal things in wholesale lots.

(If you’re writing historical fantasy, or alternate-historical fantasy, or steampunk, the sort of stuff you’ll need to research is different, but the need for it doesn’t go away.  At various times I’ve found myself looking up Victorian underwear, Renaissance typographers, and the name of the train line running from Portsmouth to London in 1863 . . . all for the same book.)

If you’re interested in some starting points for fantasy research, you can find a list of suggestions here.