Researching My Stories

Researching My Stories

Why research?

Research is a vital part of story-telling. Even if you are setting your book today, you’ll need to show your readers that it is today. So, you’ll look up something significant that happens today, and include it in your story. Or the opposite: you’re trying to make your tale timeless and have your character eat some toffos. You just dumped your story into the 1990s, but you wouldn’t know that if you hadn’t researched.

Do we really need all these details?

Well, it would be nice if I could plop some words on a page and just tell the reader to fill in the bits with their imagination. How would that look?

Say, I tell you:

Two brothers go fishing out at sea. They are both courting the same girl but their father says that the elder brother gets to marry her. The boat sinks and both brothers strike out for shore. The older brother hits some rocks on a reef and can’t swim. He drowns. The younger brother makes it to shore and marries the girl.

Image in the public domain from Wikicommons.

That’s a bit of a bare outline. Almost a newspaper report. So, let’s add some details.

Two brothers go fishing out to sea, but well within sight of land. This close to shore there are reefs. A squall comes out of nowhere, rain and wind which pushes the boat onto jagged rocks. In the wreck the older brother crushes his leg and cannot swim. “Go my brother,” the elder says. “Marry our sweet love with my blessing.” With strong kicks of his legs, the younger brother sets off, swimming to shore. But he sees sharks gathering, tasting the blood in the water. He punches the nearest shark in the gills. The shark swims away. Glancing back, he sees his brother desperately bashing at a shark with a rock. It’s having little effect.

Does the younger man swim back to help his brother?

I’ve read that punching sharks in the gills will drive them off. That’s research. And that is what makes an outline into a story.

And everyone will be happy with that?

Of course not. Any minute now, someone will turn up and tell me that bashing sharks with rocks would work more effectively than punching one in the gills. So you go deeper, to find out about the toughness of shark skin and the weakest points of a shark, just to make sure that punching in the gills is the best way for the younger brother to drive off an attack. Believe me, whatever you come up with there will always be an internet expert who shows up to point out where you went wrong.

And books with a large historical element, like Time Travel stories, will always have experts popping up to argue the minor points.

So, where do we find this information?

Having grown up without that marvellous tool for research, I took a course on How to Look Things Up On the Internet, while I was studying for my Diploma in Literature and Creative Writing. (BananaSlug is the world’s greatest Browser, shame it’s no longer updated.) Of course, with all that information, it’s all too easy to stuff your book with random information (for instance, sharks are older than trees). You have to take care that you only include the information necessary to support the story. It’s that Iceberg thing: only the tip of your research should be visible.

Different types of Time Travel

I’ve written a couple of Time Travel books. With these types of historical story, you have to keep in mind how deep your research needs to go. Both of my books required completely separate amounts of information.

Two Very Different Novels

Last Days Forever is already available. It’s a romp through time. The hero, Jack Foyle, keeps tumbling into random points of history.

Disgraced Guardian Angel, Jack Foyle, needs to rescue his girlfriend. He’s the reason she’s in danger. Jack rampages through time, searching for his true love. With the Time Cops scorching his tail feathers, and Time Criminals ambushing him in every century, Jack rips apart History to protect the man who invented Time Travel, or he’ll never find Lizzie before she dies—again.

My current work in progress, Her Borrowed Grave, is being released in October. The story includes very limited time travel, and it is just one way. But the story requires a historical explanation, up to the point where the time travel happens.

A lonely divorcée accidentally summons the five heroes and villains of a Dark Age epic poem, when she weaves a tapestry depicting her ideal man, using designs that have been handed down in her family for generations.

Elsewhere, a journalist has a horrifying surprise when his dog uncovers five bodies on the morning walk.

A Dark Age tomb is the centre of the poem and a tomb has been uncovered in an archaeological investigation in York. There has to be a link.

Even from these brief descriptions, I hope you can see there is a huge difference in the research needed for each book.

Research for Last Days Forever

Last Days Forever is set in and around Houston, Texas. Jack Foyle dies in 1989, and is

recruited to join the Guardian Angels. 1989 is the year I left Houston, but when I was writing the book in 2012, I had forgotten what happened that year. A quick check on the internet and I remembered that the key story was the Exxon Valdez disaster.

In Last Days Forever the characters are just skimming through time. As a Guardian Angel, Jack could jump in and out of time with no problem. Once he is thrown out of the GA corps, it’s more difficult. He appears at random moments of history. I decided where he was appearing and then checked for a single fact in that time, and built the chapter around that information. Each fact had to be a pin point that symbolised that time.

Take, for instance, the Jacobite Rebellion. Jack convinces a covert supporter of the exiled king to help him. In this time, there were coffee shops, and the whole chapter is built around the action in a coffee shop. Little details, like the state of the roads, and guards on laundry lines just helped build the scene, but no one needed to know a detailed history of the exiled court of the Old Pretender or his son, Bonny Prince Charlie.

Research for Her Borrowed Grave

On the other hand, Her Borrowed Grave requires much more detailed research because the characters are solidly based in one time period. The story idea started with a television programme in 2004, called Pagans, presented by Richard Rudgley. The point that called out to me was

You didn't really think I give you the cover before the grand reveal, did you?

GoldHüttes. Hats made out of thinly beaten gold, covered in astrological symbols, and conical, like a wizard’s hat. Then there was the information that smiths were considered magical, as they turned ordinary stone into metal. This gives us a glimpse into the past.

For Last Days Forever, that brief overview would be enough. But, with several chapters telling the story up to the point of the time travel, I needed more than peering through a crack. I needed a window.

Time to turned to more mainstream researchers, like Michael Wood and his History of England. In addition, I found AD500, a fictional account of a tour through Britannica in the year 500. That book contained a huge reference section at the end, which I could dig through for myself.

More recently, I follow Anglo-Saxon researchers on their podcasts and social media. From the Lady of the Mercians, I learned that the Anglo-Saxons considered Roman ruins to be made by giants. An answer on Quora suggested that living in the stone houses left by the Romans, even though they had underfloor heating, was more expensive than building a residence from warm wood. Tales from the Wihtlore helped me understand that Sunnanæfen (Sunday’s Eve) was a reasonable alternative to Sæternesdæg (Saturday) which I felt was just too Roman for my characters.

Both books required the same amount of time for research. It’s just the area and depth of study that differs.

Too Much Information

All that research was just for history, imagine how much is needed if you add Mythology and Folklore into the mix, as I do in the Theological College books.

All this information churns around in your head, and it all has to come out of your fingertips as you type. Pages and pages of information appear on the screen, swamping out the characters as they try to navigate the world you have created. Unfortunately, these books are fiction, so the characters are more important to the story. Taking figurative secateurs (in some cases a chainsaw is necessary) you cut back t

he overgrown background, like cutting back the briars to reveal Sleeping Beauty.

Once the excess information is gone, only then do you have a story.