Research, But Not Too Soon by Julia Glass

by Julia Glass

When I teach, I like debunking the mythical dictates carved in the styrofoam pillars supporting the shrine built to deify the Real Writer. (Picture the Lincoln Memorial, but it’s Ernest Hemingway up on that throne, fountain pen clenched in a fist as big as a Thanksgiving turkey.) There’s a reason, I point out, that novelists do not have to pass exams to practice their trade. Architects and sea captains, sure. Surgeons, you bet. Why not novelists? Simple: Our form of malpractice won’t kill anybody. The worst we can do is bore you silly, fail to suspend your disbelief, make you waste a little money. So we get to do this thing we do by whatever rules and rituals we devise.

Prominent among those dictates (close on the heels of Write every day) is Write what you know. Which holds true, admittedly, to the extent that every journey begins at home. But I like Grace Paley’s retort: “We don’t write about what we know; we write about what we don’t know about what we know.” Write what you want to know, and start out pretending you know a lot more than you do. Surmise, invent, and bluff your way through it as far as you can. Flex your imagination. Why else are you here?

One of the ancillary pleasures in writing fiction, however, is finding out stuff, “real” stuff, stuff you never knew before, stuff you need to know if the story you’re telling is to hold up as true. Curiosity is the apprentice to your imagination. Yet I have found that the longer I can put off my research, the stronger and tighter my stories are. This is personal, of course; maybe you, setting out to write the great modern Western, need to pack up and live as a Wyoming cowhand before you can write a single word. Herman Melville went on an honest-to-God whaling voyage, no luxury cruise, before sitting down to write Moby-Dick. I hasten to add that I am not writing historical fiction, so the broad context of my work is the world we live in now; nevertheless, I delve deeply into my characters’ personal histories, which means I’m facing history with a capital H. I may need to find out about, for instance, the rationing of farm equipment during World War II. (Wars of the last century have influenced the lives of my fictional people as dramatically as they have the lives of actual people.)

I won’t deny that laziness factors into my method. Years ago, I loved nothing more than a good excuse to roam the library stacks. Now, even heading downscreen to Safari seems like a chore when all I want to do is hang around with my characters, eavesdrop on their secrets, and get them in trouble just to find out how they’ll endure (or not).

In every story, I challenge myself to create characters outside my know-it-all zone, but never arbitrarily. Though I may not understand why, I will have felt a deep curiosity to inhabit the psyche of a wildlife biologist, a pastry chef, a Guatemalan gardener, an elderly widower, a music critic, the devout Catholic mother of two gay sons, a cancer patient, a cellist, a lonely film star, an insolent young man bent on what he sees as constructive anarchy.

To know their passions, preoccupations, and afflictions, I have researched the infrastructure of wedding cakes, the culture of a 1960s summer camp for teenage musicians, the pathology and treatment of AIDS in the 1980s, the training of Border collies, the politics of water rights in the Southwest, the conservation of grizzly bears – but I began by writing from instinct and hearsay. The problem with doing research too soon is this: If I uncover too much captivating knowledge in advance, I cannot resist including it, nor can I tell when it dilutes or distracts from the story I’m trying to tell. If, on the other hand, I must pack it into the brimming suitcase of an existing story, only the pertinent details will fit. (The vast lore I uncovered on the variously eccentric traditions surrounding wedding confections was hard to leave behind, but because I was working to authenticate an existing scene, the narrative had only so much give.) The story must be the boss of the research, not the other way around.

I like doing my research live, using people as sources whenever I can. And sometimes those people find me. Years ago, while struggling to craft a character living with the after-effects of head trauma, after reading medical journals had left me more confused than informed, I was called for jury duty – where I happened to meet a stranger who had gone through an experience parallel to that of my character. I conducted some enormously fruitful “research” over lunch breaks from the courthouse.

Inevitably, you miss things. If you’re lucky, people who read your work early on catch those gaffes before it’s too late: the clam sauce with onions, the cello seated behind the flute; an idiom or a gadget or a popular song deployed before its time. Sometimes, however, alternative facts wind up in print. In Three Junes, I began by using memory and guesswork to describe the surroundings of a Scottish country home, an essential setting, knowing I’d fine-tune the details later. Several drafts later, I consulted a guide to British birding, overwriting my placeholder blue jays, robins, and cardinals with yellowhammers, chiffchaffs, and collared doves. Botanically, however, it turns out I wasn’t so thorough.

There I was, out on tour, closing my book after reading to a small audience, when a hand shot up, emphatically. “Excuse me,” said my questioner, “but please see page 117. It isn’t possible, you realize, for the women’s final at Wimbledon to fall within the month of June. And, on page 47, can you tell me what a dogwood tree is doing in Scotland? Dogwoods grow only in North America.” He was holding a copy of my book sprouting a thicket of Post-Its. He was my first of a certain kind of reader. I want to hug and slug these people at the very same time. They are, after all, devoted to the truth.

Okay, so he had me on Wimbledon – a necessary torqueing of reality that I had hoped no one would notice. “But as for the dogwood,” I said, keeping my cool, “there were these American houseguests who, wanting to make a memorable impression on their Scottish hosts, and knowing how much they cherished their garden, smuggled a dogwood sapling in their luggage as a house present. The climate proved perfectly hospitable. The guests were invited back. Next time, they brought a pair blue jays.”

Julia Glass the author of six novels, including the best-selling Three Junes, winner of the National Book Award, and I See You Everywhere, winner of the Binghamton University John Gardner Fiction Book Award. Other published works include Chairs in the Rafters and essays in several anthologies. Glass is a Distinguished Writer in Residence at Emerson College. She lives with her family in Marblehead, Massachusetts.

Julia's essay is excerpted from Signature's 2017 Ultimate Writing Guide - which you can download for free!

On Character Movement: I Don't Care If They Have An Itchy Nose

About a year ago I started offering manuscript critique services for aspiring authors. I give the kind of feedback that I want from my own critique partners - a heavy dose of tough love along with a touch of praise. The tough love is what makes all writers (including myself) improve. The touch of praise is there because creating is a difficult job, and even the act of putting words to the page deserves recognition. 

What doesn't deserve recognition is every footfall, head turn, eyebrow rise, nose scratch, and finger twitch of any character. 

This is a hangup of mine, and I freely admit that I often go too far in the other direction and have one (or more) of my trusted critique partners let me know that my characters went from talking in the library to riding in a car without a transition. And no, that's not acceptable. 

What is acceptable?

Movement pertinent to plot and setting.

Is your character shading their eyes from the hot California sun? Bingo - that matters because you just found a way to get setting in there without saying, "I live in California."

Is your character scratching their nose because they're allergic to cats and that fact plays into the meet-cute you've got planned with the manager of the local Humane Society? Okay, cool.

This is the kind of movement that matters because it's relevant. Too much character movement can kill a scene. So if you've got dialogue that reads like this:

"I don't understand," Samantha said, her eyebrows coming together.

It doesn't work, in my opinion. The eyebrows coming together are to illustrate confusion. But the confusion is already there in the words she said. What's happening here (and I was completely guilty of this when I started) is that you're trying too hard to control the picture. You want your reader to see what you see, and that means you're overwriting. The nose scratch shows confusion, or nervousness - but good dialogue will show that on its own. Let your reader fill in the body language. 

A bigger issue with character movement is getting characters from one point to another. 

For one thing, if it's not all that important, throw in a scene break. If they're in school for a scene, and then the next thing that happens relevant to the story is over dinner, scene break. You don't need to fill in with meaningless stuff just to make time pass - your book isn't delivered in real time. We assume stuff happened in between first period and dinner, but that it doesn't matter to the story. You don't narrate every time your character, eats, drinks, bathes, or goes to the bathroom. We assume they do those things.

Getting them from one place to another within a scene can be trickier. You don't want a scene break every time the setting changes or you'll have a bunch of two paragraph chapters. If you start with your character waking up and next thing is them eating breakfast, you don't have to narrate that they went downstairs. We figure that out on our own.

Everything I say above is subjective. This is me speaking about what I prefer to read, and how I like to write. That being said, I do think that shaving down character movement gives your reader more freedom to visually interpret scenes in their own way, pulling them deeper into the book through that very interaction.

And that's where you want them.

Why You Should Still Write When Everything Around You Is Going To Hell

Writing is not easy.

It's never been easy. I'm not the kind of writer who springs out of bed, eager to start the day's work. In fact I've only sprung from my bed once, and that was when I thought there was a burglar in my house and the only thing I had to defend myself with was a thirty pound bag of cat litter.

But that's another story.

There's a great hashtag on Twitter at the moment, #WriteYourResistance, and I encourage anyone who has characters who stand up when they're told to sit down or shout when they're told to shut up to check it out. And while those are easily recognizable acts of opposition, equally important are the characters who enact quieter forms - refusing to kick someone who is down, or even helping them up.

It's hard to tear yourself away from the news feed to work on a piece of fiction. Our fake worlds feel paper thin, motivations for people who don't exist hard to come by when a paradigm shift is happening in reality, and there are impactful actionable items on your to-do list that may shape tomorrow.

Those things are important. Go do them.

Then come back to your book.

What I'm working on right now is a humorous paranormal. Yes, you read that right. It's a weird, quirky little thing that no one is ever going to label as important. My characters aren't planting their flags or taking the moral high ground. They're running down spooky eBay listings and wondering if the little bit of plastic fork they accidentally bit off is digestible.

So how can I turn off the reality IV and put my time into something so trite?

Because I might be reading 1984 right now, but last night I watched Romancing the Stone.

For fifteen years I worked in a high school in one of the poorest counties in my state. Some of my students didn't have heat, clean clothes, or food in their stomachs. Those kids weren't reading heavy, message-laden books. Not because they were incapable, but because they know enough about reality.

What they were looking for was escape.

And they found it in books.

So write your book, even now. Write to communicate your message of strength and love. Write for that reader in the future that needs to get away for an hour or two.

Just write.