Research: The Search for Squoozhfen

“How do you know so much about sailing ships?” the editor asked me.

I stared at them in confusion. “I looked up 17th century merchant sailing ships on the Internet.”

I had written a short story which took place on a trading ship, and I knew almost nothing about them, so I did what I thought was the obvious thing – I looked it up. But then, sometimes I miss the obvious – I’d forgotten that I’m the daughter of a reference librarian, and grew up with a full set of the Encyclopedia Britannica (and a historical facsimile of the original). Those books really got used, whether it was for looking at pretty horse breed pictures, doing a class paper on the history of electricity, or trying to figure out Sumerian hieroglyphics. In other words, I was taught very young to research.

The axiom that is often taught to young writers is, “Write what you know.” It’s pretty obvious that there is a serious problem with this, depending on how literally you take it. What you know for certain is strictly your own experience and thoughts – if you took this too far, writing fiction would be impossible. But OK – let’s say that it simply means you need to only write about what you’re certain of. That would still leave out entire genres, fantasy and science fiction, historical fiction (good luck getting a perfectly accurate historical account of anything!) and probably a number of others as well.

On the other hand, the reasons writers are told to write what they know is because the imagination is a wonderfully fertile place where all sorts of connections are made that aren’t necessarily logical, sensible, or accurate.

Say there’s a game called squoozhfen that is played in Isthmustakan. You’ve never seen it played, you’ve just heard about how it uses ping pong paddles and a koosh. You’re writing a thriller set in Isthmustakan, and you describe playing squoozhfen on a table, with two people batting the koosh back and forth with their ping pong paddles. That’s great, until the reader who’s been to Isthmustakan, and who is a squoozhfen enthusiast, points out that the ping pong paddles are actually a foot wide, and the game really consists of three people who bounce the giant koosh up and down from their paddles to see how many times each player can hit the ceiling. The authenticity of your writing has just been destroyed, and anyone who knows the game will not feel properly immersed in the reading experience.

The best way to avoid this is, of course, to research. That used to be much harder before the days of an easily accessible Internet – say late 80’s to early 90’s. But that’s thirty years, with older writers having plenty of time to adapt, and younger writers having never done without the resource. But even before that time, there were libraries and encyclopedias, newspapers, records, and experts to ask.

Perhaps the better phrase would be “Write what you understand.” And what you understand is influenced by what you research. It would take less than a minute to look up squoozhfen on Wikipedia, find out what the koosh looks like, see a picture of people playing it, and discover it was once the official game in the medieval Isthmustakan royal court. Of course, Wikipedia has its limits – you don’t want to use it for serious research of specialized things, because, since it’s user amended, it’s subject to the biases and misinformation of whoever has added to it. But there are so many other sources, many of them still right under an author’s fingertips, that you can learn enough to make your story read as real because you understand what you’re writing about. You can create the sense of immersion in the story that it requires.

But what about speculative fiction? Well, the same thing applies. If you’ve got your world built properly, you should know what mirrors the real world, and what is firmly out of your imagination. That story on the ship was a piece of fantasy, but I wanted to know what a real ship would have to be like for the kind of story I was writing. Other elements came directly from my head, but unless I had changed the entire physics of water, which I didn’t choose to do (it’s a legit thing to do in fantasy, as long as you explain it), I needed to know what the conditions felt like so that I could immerse (sorry for the semi-unintentional pun) my readers in the story. I didn’t take a college course on it, I simply gleaned enough information to make it feel real, and not to trigger the nonsense detectors of my readers.

One thing I have seen a bit of recently is authors who don’t research something, presumably assuming that a) it’s only a little piece of the story so it doesn’t matter or b) that they can fake it well enough so that their readers don’t notice. This can sometimes work, but it might be a bad idea to trust it. If it’s something you really do know about, that’s fine. But the problem with a is that a tiny little piece of story that is seriously wrong can completely upset the reader’s suspension of disbelief and bounce them out of the story. The problem with b is that maybe you can fake it, but if you don’t do it successfully, it has the potential to make a reader who does know about the subject stop reading altogether.

I have sometimes stopped in the middle of a story when I realize I don’t have enough knowledge for the scene I’m writing, and gone on a hunt to learn what I need to know. Sometimes everything I learn boils down to a paragraph, or even just a sentence, but it helps to keep the feeling of verisimilitude, and hopefully ensure that the reader will stay engrossed in the story.

So write what you understand. Research what you don’t. And never assume that your readers won’t know.