Research advice

Some Lonely Scorpio

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Does anyone have any advice for researching historical fiction? I used to get so bogged down in the research rabbit hole, and for the longest time this prevented me from actually writing the damn story. :p I finally began the first draft of my novel in August and have been writing at a steady pace since then. I've learned a few things since my initial failure to launch, (ie, don't focus too much on tiny historical minutiae, if it's not relevant to the story don't include it, etc.) but I was wondering if anyone else had any tips or advice they wanted to share.
 

Chris P

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For 20th century and later stuff, I found YouTube videos with actual footage invaluable. Even more so period non-fic memoirs and narratives are a gold mine. A few years ago I was working on a WWI project, and one of the hardest things was capturing what people felt at the time, free of any hindsight brought about by later events. I ran across "My Year of the Great War" by Frederick Palmer, an American journalist, published in 1915. If you could find something like that for WWII I think you would learn a lot.
 

Some Lonely Scorpio

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For 20th century and later stuff, I found YouTube videos with actual footage invaluable. Even more so period non-fic memoirs and narratives are a gold mine. A few years ago I was working on a WWI project, and one of the hardest things was capturing what people felt at the time, free of any hindsight brought about by later events. I ran across "My Year of the Great War" by Frederick Palmer, an American journalist, published in 1915. If you could find something like that for WWII I think you would learn a lot.

Agreed 1000%. I look at pictures/video wherever possible and read memoirs, eyewitness accounts, and other primary sources. You're so right, one of the most difficult things about writing historical fiction- in general- is that we have hindsight, historical characters do not. So at times it can be extremely difficult to get a feel of what people actually thought and felt like at the time.
 

Siri Kirpal

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Yep. Sounds like you've got the primary bases covered. You might try writing more and make notes of what you need as you go, then look those up later.

Blessings,

Siri Kirpal
 

Some Lonely Scorpio

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Sat Nam! (literally "Truth Name"--a Sikh greeting)

Yep. Sounds like you've got the primary bases covered. You might try writing more and make notes of what you need as you go, then look those up later.

Blessings,

Siri Kirpal


At this point I'm more or less done in terms of research and bookmarked everything in case I need to refer back to it. Of course, integrating that research into the story is another problem all its own. :p I admit I have this tendency to infodump when I should really only be talking about the details that are actually relevant...
 

Siri Kirpal

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So, it sounds like you're really asking about how to integrate the research rather than how to do it. Yes?

Blessings,

Siri Kirpal
 

Some Lonely Scorpio

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Sat Nam! (literally "Truth Name"--a Sikh greeting)

So, it sounds like you're really asking about how to integrate the research rather than how to do it. Yes?

Blessings,

Siri Kirpal


Yes, I should have made that clearer. My apologies. Any advice about that you're willing to share?
 

Siri Kirpal

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The way I've been doing it is telling/showing the story and showing the environment -- the mix of Model T cars with horse drawn buggies, for instance. And when I need to tell the reader some important piece of history, I drop it into someone's thoughts -- that women had the vote in Oregon in 1912, for instance.

Blessings,

Siri Kirpal
 

Chris P

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As for how to do it, here's where I say read read read read. Take notes. Analyze. Ask yourself the tough questions of specifically why a certain technique works for you or why it doesn't. How have you seen it done well? How have you seen it done poorly? Keep in mind too that reader preferences vary. As a nerd, I don't mind a paragraph or two now and then to provide essential information that informs the plot, with the caveat that it needs to fit the narrator's voice and not go down rabbit holes into "gee-whiz that's cool for its own sake" detail. Others are not so forgiving. Probably others feel more emmersed and enriched by even more detail.
 

autumnleaf

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Some of your research will inform the plot. So the current status of the war will impact your characters depending on their location and role. An ordinary person in occupied Warsaw might not know too much about the current maneuverings of the German and Allied armies, but he sees the Nazi insignia around his own city, notices that the Jews are now confined to the ghetto, perhaps knows someone who's been arrested or gone missing, feels the effect of food shortages, etc. This all influences his own feelings and the actions he decides to take.

Other research provides the details that build a picture of the era -- things like clothes, music, architecture, figures of speech. I try to slip these details in naturally and in a way that fits the characters. So, a character puts a record on the gramophone (period detail) and it's a particular hit from the 1940s (another period detail, but also potentially an insight into her personality and tastes). The whole "show don't tell" thing.

There will be a lot of details you'll leave out. Unless your characters are involved in Battle X, or unless Battle X has an obvious impact on them, you don't need to mention it.
 
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edutton

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You might try writing more and make notes of what you need as you go, then look those up later.
This is exactly what I'm doing with my current first draft.
Characters go to [find appropriate hotel] to confront the villain.
"I read in yesterday's issue of [newspaper - was Le Monde active in 1889?*] that..."



*answer: no. :)
 

Atlantic12

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You're writing in the era I do, and I've learned to watch out for several things. The reader is going to have quite a lot of general knowledge about the war, so don't spend too much time describing stuff people have seen a thousand times. Also there"s a ton of stuff already written and filmed, so watch out for cliche scenes and stale character and storylines.

The era is relatively easy to research, and that means too much info. I had to accept the fact that 95% of what I know won't show up in the books I write. On the other hand, modern scholarship on the war is phenomenal, and much of it has unchained itself from cold war views or the concept of collective guilt etc. The era was a lot more morally muddy than people used to admit, and our stories can reflect that.
 

Some Lonely Scorpio

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Don't worry, I'm trying to steer away from the typical action-heavy war story. The war itself will be more in the background; and the focus is how it affects these characters psychologically. It will also be extremely morally-gray. Even now a lot of people have this perception that World War II had a very simplistic black-and-white morality which, obviously, it really didn't.
 

Norman Mjadwesch

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It helps if you know people with a cultural background from the area in which you are writing, though obviously they will need to have lived at that time or shortly thereafter (to hear the stories of the ones who experienced it if they were too young at the time). My father’s family grew up south of Berlin and all I need to do to plug into the mindset of the German people is to put my memory on rewind and listen to his syntax and habits, especially when he is talking to his brother and in-laws. These are old people now, and finding survivors from the war is rapidly becoming impossible – Rommel’s driver lived an hour’s drive from my house (so I was told, but not until after the fellow had died) and I was recently asked by a friend if I would interview a RAAF pilot who had flown Spitfires in the Pacific but that bloke died before I could organise anything.

While all of that information is pretty useless for practical purposes, it is also true that while I have not yet started any books for the WW2 era (oh, they are coming!), I did use the personalities and mannerisms of Germanic people I knew to write a novel set in WW1. One of the people who read my book phoned me one day and asked how I knew so much about Germans, because he had lived there for a while and said I had to have had inside information because he felt that I had nailed then down pretty solidly. Again, useless to anyone doesn’t have that sort of access, but here’s the tip:

People are people, and if their cultures are similar then they are going to have a lot of similarities. Certainly there are differences between different time periods, which is where research comes in, but some things are universal. If you want insights into mindsets from particular situations, compare them to what you already know – firsthand experience is better. For instance, if you have been in a car smash then you know all about the way the brain accelerates to process things and you can use that for other adrenalin-fuelled scenarios. Personal loss is another thing that you can draw upon to use in your writing if you are comfortable to do so, and interviewing people who have done the things you would like to portray is a valid way of gaining insight into whatever it is that you are interested in. Mental trauma may have been viewed differently back in the day, but the effects were about the same as they are now – human beings are all essentially wired the same way.

Then you stitch it all together using the show-not-tell technique, which others have already mentioned here. If you get a few small things slightly wrong, they are less likely to be detected if you place them amid a whole heap of verified material (that is not always a good thing, because most of us want to eradicate all errors from our writing).

At the end of the day, the past is different to the present. What if, hypothetically, a long time ago people didn’t experience certain emotions that we now take for granted (take your pick). We would assume that any account that said otherwise was misinformed. To illustrate: all Germans and Japanese were evil; Stalin was a good guy until WW2 ended and then he became a baddie – as convenient as such perceptions were to better prosecute the war, those are assumptions that just don’t stand up against scrutiny. How well represented do any of us feel by the actions of our various governments? Overall, people are as intelligent now as they were seventy or a hundred years ago, and just as misled by mainstream media. We as writers write for an audience, and the audience that we write for are living and breathing right now – our words have to chime with what our current readers believe in (or else provide a plausible challenge) or those readers won’t pick up the next book.
 
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The Black Prince

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If you can afford it, I can't recommend highly enough the importance of travelling to the various locations and absorbing their ambience. So valuable for hitting the right atmos notes - little subtleties that will creep into your writing as you barely notice.

Mind you, do your research before you go. I've told this story before so apologise to those who've already seen it...

My recently published novel dealt with the six years leading up to the Battle of Hastings. I went to every main location to get a proper feel for it but one of my main aims was to get to Falaise Castle in Normandy where William the Conqueror grew up. I had this idea that I could find a strange looking rock in a stair case and have William in the story staring at the rock as he made the decision to invade England. Then later, readers could visit the castle and find the rock etc.

It's a really long way from Avoca Beach in Australia to Falaise in Normandy, and as I walked up the ramp to the castle, already breathing in the shreds of William's ambience, my wife pointed to a sign that said: Falaise Castle...built 1147.

Doh!
 

benbenberi

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Yeah, when you're dealing with any historical time period there's a risk that what you're looking at now is not what was there then. The further back in the past, the greater the risk that not only individual buildings & roads are different, but entire landscapes have been transformed. It's very difficult, for instance, to look at the familiar modern landscape of rural England, with its tidy fields and hedgerows and villages, and imagine what it might have looked like centuries ago before enclosures had destroyed the old open fields and the whole system of land use built around them. Or (to take a more modern example) look at the flat, gridded, bustling streetscapes of modern Manhattan and try to imagine the rolling, rustic landscapes of 1830 -- the streams have been buried, the hills dynamited and leveled, farms and wetlands and whole villages erased.

But traveling to a place is still the best way to get a feel for the place. The air and the light and the sense of space are something you can't ever quite get from a book or a screen. And some facts of geography are stable over time.
 

tallus83

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If you have cable and it has the Military History channel look for The Color of War. It is narrated by Peter Coyote and has shows that delve into a specific area per show. The Home front, occupied countries, after the war, etc. Very informative.
 
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mrsfauthor

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For 20th century and later stuff, I found YouTube videos with actual footage invaluable. Even more so period non-fic memoirs and narratives are a gold mine.

What great advice! I am writing about a historical figure from the mid 20th and this will be quite helpful. Thank you!
 

mrsfauthor

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At this point I'm more or less done in terms of research and bookmarked everything in case I need to refer back to it. Of course, integrating that research into the story is another problem all its own. :p I admit I have this tendency to infodump when I should really only be talking about the details that are actually relevant...

I thought sharing my process might be helpful...I use Scrivener but you could probably adapt this to any other program. When I have a webpage I've referred to, I add it to the Scrivener bookmarks on that page. It is incredible how often I go back to that particular bookmark...some of them I don't even remembering consulting in the first place. Because I can access from within the program, it is an easy click when rewriting, I have the basic info at my fingertips. When I write a scene, I write it plainly then add the details such as haircuts, products used, foods consumed, etc.

Another place to look for information is your local college's library and/or archives. The librarians are eager to help with projects if they have time and archivists are so knowledgable though they can be a little sensitive about their materials so I've found it best to approach with care. Plus its free.
 

mrsfauthor

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If you can afford it, I can't recommend highly enough the importance of travelling to the various locations and absorbing their ambience. So valuable for hitting the right atmos notes - little subtleties that will creep into your writing as you barely notice.

Doh!

Totally agree with this. Even if the area you are writing about has been updated, there is still a sense of space and movement that one can get from this experience. I take photos and study them for details later if the building is original to the time frame. Talk to people, i.e. storekeepers or restaurant owners who either lived in that time else know some lore about the your era. I have found most people more than willing to take a minute to chat about what was in that place before. I had a security guard give me an impromptu tour of a hospital. Pretty sure he shouldn't have done that but he got very excited about my project (tv pilot script)--I think he was hoping to be an extra.