On Research

Photo by David R. Gluns

Research can be a seductive thing for a writer. Fact-finding opens endless possibilities for story-spinning, and is never fraught with the paralyzing indecision that sometimes occurs when faced with the all-to-common cliché of the blank page.

Wind Tails was originally to be set in 1977—as it is now. I thought that, by setting the story of a seventeen-year-old girl in the year I was seventeen, I’d avoid a lot of research, because I was there. The truth is, Wind Tails could be set at any time, because its themes of journey and points of departure are pretty timeless. Write what you know, they say, and although I’ve never been a waitress, I was pretty sure I could guess at the emotions of a seventeen-year-old having been one myself, especially when set in my era.

What happened was that, in spite of my plan, I became seduced by the research, and ended up on a journey of my own.

I knew I had a hitchhiker, but I wasn’t entirely sure what he was doing there; neither did he, as it turned out, which was the point. The summer after I began writing Wind Tails, a group of draft dodgers from the Vietnam War decided to hold a reunion of those war-resisters who had settled in Canada. The influx of young, disillusioned Americans into our valleys had changed our rural society forever; I was fascinated. There was also a part of me that felt I’d been born ten years too late, anyway: the social and political activism, never mind the music, set the stage for time less shallow, it seemed to me, than the disco-era seventies and eighties. I became smitten with the idea, and began rewriting the story to be set seven years earlier.

I went to the Our Way Home reunion in the summer of 2006. I interviewed draft-dodgers and Vietnam vets, both at the conference and in my home-town, where I was delighted to discover the colourful backgrounds many of my friends and neighbours. I immersed myself in music: David Crosby’s Chicago; CSNY’s Woodstock. I watched videos about the 1960s and 70s; I leaned about the Chicago Seven, the Weather Underground, the Diggers. And then I set to write the backstory of my draft-dodger, the one who was hitchhiking with the wind.

It’s one thing to write about an event taking place in 1905. Conjecture is expected; few are still around who actually lived at that time, so it safer. Writing about a trapper in a remote corner of B.C. required research, to be sure. I read a great deal, and I talked to former Renata residents who trapped as youngsters; I even saw the bear trap that hung in the cabin of the character on which Gus Sanders was (loosely) based. Even writing about the 1960s, at the end of Treading Water, was not so hard: I do remember the words to Last Train to Clarksville, thanks to my older sister’s collection of 45s, and former Renata residents filled in the rest.

The Vietnam War and its domestic fallout was a heady time, an era of social change, of the rewriting of a worldview through the eyes of the young. Crosby wrote: “we can change the world”, and people believed it. In fact, they did change the world, from the Black Panthers to the Students for a Democratic Society. It’s a seductive era to research.

But the bottom line, after a year of research and first, second, and third drafts, was that I didn’t live it. For me, it was too big to write about. I had talked to so many people, and read so many books, listened to so much music and saw so many films, what emerged on the page was an oversimplified, clichéd distillation of too much research. Somebody in my writing group asked me: “what is the point you’re trying to make?” and to my horror, I could no longer say.

There is the temptation to include all of the facts you have gleaned from your exhaustive research, because they all become equally important. The sacrifice when this happens can be the human element, those feelings that motivate and inform us, and that exist independent of the times. When I worked as a newspaper reporter for a short stint several years ago, I quickly learned when to stop the interview: too much information, and the thrust of the story gets lost. I remember asking Canadian novelist Timothy Taylor, at a Q & A session after a reading, how much research he does for his stories, which seem so wonderfully informed on everything from horseracing to art. “Just enough,” was the answer, “and no more.”

I pulled the book back to 1977 after a full year of immersion in the Vietnam war era.  To this day it strikes me as ironic that the book was about direction, and I became so hopelessly lost in the process. I re-read my first outline and came back to the original point of departure. And all that research? Not for this book, but no knowledge is ever without value. I learned from the material, and I learned from the process; it’s all valuable, and all part of the journey.

This is not to say that historical research isn’t essential for people writing historical fiction, or that some research isn’t necessary for pretty much anything outside the writer’s personal experience. Short of memoir, we are all going to find ourselves in unfamiliar territory as writers, and there’s the thrill of the challenge.

I loved interviewing people for Treading Water and for Wind Tails, because primary research is, in my opinion, the very best. In this way, you don’t just find out how the bear-trap works, you find out how it feels in your hands, and what emotions the sight of those malicious teeth might invoke. As a librarian, I am enamoured with book research, and vastly indebted to the inter-library loan system, and could spend many happy days curled up with a cup of tea and a stack of books. And Google is definitely my friend.

But the secret is knowing when to stop; of knowing what, as Timothy Taylor put it, is “just enough.” You don’t want your truck driver picking up a cell phone when it should be a CB, or your waitress making a decaf latte when she should be pouring percolated coffee at least three hours old from an urn the size of a fire hydrant. But you don’t need to know the social history of coffee, or how a CB actually works, either.

You need to know just enough so that your characters can get on with their journey, and your readers can travel with them.