Research as Part of a Creative Novelist's Process

Wendy’s Newsletter

The Writing Process

Newsletter 11 Thursday April 29^th 2015

Hello again. Thank you for returning to my Newsletter.

If this is your first time, welcome. 

Often, when I am signing my books or reading from them, people will comment on the amount of research one  must complete to get the details right in my novels which span from the 1890s to the present day, and in space from the hills of South Durham to wales, Singapore,,

Reading at
 in Bishop Auckland Library

 the United States and the Languedoc in South West France,

I have just written a post for my blog HERE about travelling in the mind as well as in physical terms. As well as this it’s also necessary for a novelist to travel in time, to research the time-contexts of the novel, to the extent that she feels comfortable and knowing, as she imagines and intuits the minds of her characters who lived in very different times.

Only then can she be creative, intuitive and playful in the way I outlined in Newsletter Three. Only in this way can we let the story forge its own creative path for us, even if it occurs in the 1890s, the

Gladstone Library,Hawarden.
I have researched and written here.
Middlesbrough Central  -
where I have also researched and read -
has the same  studious feel

1940s, or the 1960s. Of course the evidenced facts must be respected. Her story needs to be bedded in the public truths of those times so that it can fly free and fresh in her imagination.

 For Newsletter Eleven -

I have decided to put together my own thoughts on how I do my research and how I find resources so that my story is underpinned but not confined by historical facts, Of course the early part of the process involves straight historical research. Academic research was part of my day job before I became a full time writer, so I am aware of the rules.

Sources

At the beginning I tackle the Big Read, not dissimilar to the first

The Ultra Modern
Newcastle City Library
Fabulous Glass

reading phase when one is writing a thesis. To obtain these facts one follows the historic method one uses Libraries, Histories, Maps, Museums, Journal articles, academic studies, archived Newspapers and Magazines and other more fugitive ephemera such as itineraries and catalogues. And of course the swift resolution of the contemporary Internet search engines-

This is fascinating process requiring all kinds of judgement calls. As the novel grows, I will frequently return to these sources to verify certain fact. I might dig further to clarify elements in the narrative that I hadn’t foreseen.

But for me as a novelist this is only the beginning.

So I thought you might be interested in this novelist’s idiosyncratic research process

On average, in the last twenty years, I have written and published a novel each year. However there is a degree of overlap in the timing of the research for each novel. It takes much more than a year to generate a notion for a novel and complete the research to underpin it,

This is how it goes.

While I am at the later stages of completing one novel – the

An inviting reading corner
in Newcastle City Library.

transcribing and publishing cycles it happens that ideas already existing somewhere in my mind through time  begin to gather story-spurs and character-spins. Then more ideas and scraps of information lodge there somewhere.  

It’s as though these notions and ideas, inspiration and research fragments are iron filings on a metal tray. In time they begin to form patterns and shapes.    

At first I try to take no notice and focus on the absolutely final stages of this year’s story. But then the time comes when this year’s novel seems to be out of my mind, finished and I can’t resist tapping the tray with my creative magnet and generate new shapes of my own.

So, what stage am I at now?

I have now completed my work on my lovely Writing at the Maison Bleue (incidentally set in 2002 and travelling back in part to 1942). The launch is tomorrow (Friday 1^st May).   An at last I have handed it over to my readers for them to join their imagined world to mine,

 What next?

I have to tell you in confidence that I have now tapped this year’s metal tray with my magnet tray and what is emerging is a story that starts in May 1941 on an island in the Greek Archipeligo and reaches its climax here in Britain in the 1960s.

My main characters have spun themselves into being. I know there are two main characters. There is this young man: his story starts in that island in 1941. (I am enjoying more and more including young men in my stories.). The other character is a middle aged woman who we – and the young man - will (I think) get to meet towards the middle of the story,

And more research is involved when I develop my story by tapping my metal tray and seeing what starts to make a cluster.

But the fact is as a novelist my research is different to that of the straight historian. 

Sticking to evidenced historic facts can tend to create an awkward historical pastiche which can seem dead and gone to a modern reader. Of course fact laden novels can ‘teach’ readers some facts they didn’t know before. But they can sit stiff, wooden and irrelevant ruining the dynamic ebb and flow of a modern narrative,

Such evidenced facts can much more naturally ‘learned’ if – as does the researcher-novelist herself - you read diaries, autobiographies and journals. Such works have much more dynamism than a manufactured didactic story.

What good fiction does is bring to bear a modern identity and world-view (which she shares with her readers) into that historic evidenced world.

The novelist’s task is to engage the imagination so that the reader can empathise and identify with people who lived in another time, in another place. She needs to get into the mind-set of her characters who live in a different era.  So that when they read the story her readers can feel and think, and laugh and cry with them.

What cannot be gainsaid is – however some writers and academics may flee from this – that within the world of the novel a view of the world emerges from and illuminates present-day concerns and interests.

For me this is what makes a novel come to life for both the writer and the reader. And it makes other decades, other eras, come to life and tell us something about our own.

Happy writing, happy researching!

Wendy