As part of my research for my WIP, I’ve been looking at several topics that will be points of interest along the road to a completed novel. Events that have not been part of my “real life” experience that I need to be able to describe when my protagonist encounters them.
I’ve been reading most of my life and it wasn’t until I started serious work on this project that I realized I had never wondered how the authors of adventure books or war novels could make action scenes so real if they hadn’t ever been involved in such things. Surely Stephen King has never crawled through the storm drains of Derry. I know that Frank Herbert didn’t have the opportunity to visit space before he began the Dune Series.
As I fumble my way along this path to becoming an author, I’ve discovered that even though I began with the “write what you know” premise, I don’t know enough. There are events within the story that I’ve never personally experienced. At first, I was tempted to just “make stuff up.” But, there are people out there who have similar experiences. I feel that it would be a kind of insult to them if my imagination didn’t match the reality.
I know that my family has a tendency to react in a negative manner when we see something on TV or in a movie that we know doesn’t match real life. I’ve been known to stop reading in the middle of a story that didn’t feel true. Don’t misunderstand, I am a SciFi geek. I don’t require every story to be factual. I’m no Joe Friday, but I do require some sort of reality basis. Even when reading fantasy, I need it to make sense.
I’ve come to the conclusion that good authors may need that inexhaustible imagination, but they also have to do a lot of research. Behind the scenes of those great books is a lot of investigation. That’s where the real genius is. The writer who can take an event that could have happened and describe it as though they were there, get all the feelings, images, smells, and sounds, that writer is an author.
I’m not saying fiction can’t be made up entirely out of our heads. Some elements of every story we write come from our own experiences, others arise from experiences we’ve witnessed first hand as they happened to others. But, I can’t describe the look, feel, and smell of Memphis if I’ve never been there. I must depend on someone else’s description or travel to Tennessee and spend some time prowling the streets. I can’t tell you, from my own experience, what happens when a woman is notified by a stranger knocking on her door that her husband was killed in the war. To get that right, I need to find an outside source.
So, I am falling back on my English 102 training. Research, research, research. Be able to quote three reliable sources for every fact, when necessary. Never make a far-reaching, generalized statement that can’t be backed up.
Even if you begin with “Once upon a time” and end with “happily ever after,” what comes in the middle should have ties to some kind of reality. “Alice in Wonderland” and “The Wizard of Oz” were pure fantasy, but they still made a kind of logical sense. The reader, after all, must be able to keep track of the storyline and find a willingness to accept the possibility that it could have happened just that way.
So, I’m looking for Vietnam war stories from the perspective of someone who got that knock on the door. If you know of any that might be useful, drop the source in the comment box. I’ll look for it and, if I use it, mention you in the thank you notes when my book is published. 😉
Comments are closed.