I woke up at 5:30 to research Scots Pine, mountain pine, ans Siberian Pine. After going over their present range, distribution, and habitat, I read a fasinating article on the evolution of European forests and the reforestation processess that occured following each iceage. All this was because in one chapter of one book I need to referance a pine. I'm a firm believer in write what you know and if you don't know, find out. So, what's the oddest thing you've researched for a book?
What the coasts would look like after massive arctic melting and the effect it would have on the world. There's surprisingly little speculation, at least that I could find, so I'm going to make it up. Tornado Alley a constant storm plain? Sure! My hometown nearly crumbling because a massive earthquake made the caves collapse? Why not! Parts of Florida becoming islands and only accessible by boats? Of course!
You mean a map like this: http://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2013/09/rising-seas-ice-melt-new-shoreline-maps/ Or more detailed analysis of local climates? Or are you looking for scenarios describing how humans would react?
I spend countless hours researching the standard walking rate of unencumbered people, and how far they might reasonably travel in a day, in a horse drawn carriage drawn by two horses. During that time, I researched whether or not the air temperature is warmer inside a forest than outside. Spoilers: Its warmer inside the forest!
While writing my assassin romance novella, my search history probably would have been very interesting to the FBI. Everything from how to avoid a video surveillance camera to how soon into a campaign does a presidential candidate have Secret Service protection to caliber of gun that works best with a silencer.
Ballet, gymnastics, circus acts and Romani language. Pro tip; the latter one is way harder than the first three. However, I don't really believe in researching at least not in the way that most people do. I spent the time to research these specific things because they were important things my characters were going to both talk about and perform and thus I needed to sound like I was describing something that people actually really do. I was looking up things that exist in the real world then describing those things. That's the kind of research I think is worth it. I don't know what mail boxes look like in Israel, say, so I'm going to look that up and describe them and then forget about it. Details brought in to add verisimilitude. However, I don't think you need to bother getting bogged down in the minutiae of things that your audience will take your word for. I can appreciate the desire for authenticity but I think there's a limit there. At the end of the day it doesn't really matter if it's warmer in forests or not; if you story needs it to be warmer then most readers will go with that anyway and never even think to check it. After all, it's fiction. People are here to suspend disbelief. If you can gain authenticity quickly then fine, especially when that helps you to make sure that certain elements remain consistent through the length of a work, but at the end I don't think there's a need to go out and learn so deeply. To be brutally honest; researching isn't writing. It's interesting but it's not writing. And the most time you can spend writing the better. If you care about making things feel like the real world then just google the thing, look at the pictures or glance through a wiki page, then go back to writing.
Yeah, I found the map. But I could find very little on what the climate would be like. Colder, hotter, wetter, drier, etc. So that's what I'm making up.
@LostThePlot When your manuscript gets rejected because your first page has a Scottish maid peeling potatoes when vikings land on the beach to commence raping and pillaging, you might reconsider. Something that is very obviously out of place will pull readers right out of a story. I damn near dropped the book when I came across the word potato in a story about vikings. After some deep breathing I circled the word, offered an explination, and brought viking age receipies with me to our next critique meeting. Just because you didn't bother to look something up doesn't mean you readers won't notice that it's wrong.
Among other things, I've researched how quickly you can heal (to walking ability) different ankle injuries, and (in my exact words at the time): "just how dead someone would be after falling 50 feet onto pavement".
Yes, those things are best made up. Generally speaking, in the northern hemisphere, the climate zones will move towards the north: Florida will become more like Panama, New York will resemble present day Georgia. But it is all very uncertain; if the ocean currents change, all of northern Europe gets a lot colder. The air currents could also easily get messed up. Add in some earthquakes and volcanos, and you'll get a couple of years of winter on top of the climate changes. Are most people dead, or do you have massive refugee issues? In your scenario, 600 million people would become homeless in China alone. Denmark, Netherlands, Belgium and half of Germany would disappear. Some of us could move north towards Sibiria and Canada, but the darkness during winter will continue to limit how much food you can grow.
Oddest thing so far: sunrise and sunset times in Koblenz in Germany, July - October. Runner up: ladders on fire engines. Honourable mentions include how long it takes to recover from an appendectomy, how high does a building need to be to have a high chance of killing you when you fall off it but still have a chance of survival under normal circumstances, and maps of eruption deposits from the last eruption of Laacher See. All of these were for my current work in progress.
That's exactly the opposite of what I'm talking about. Mistakes that stand out to the reader break suspension of disbelief. But if I write that a character has a silver porsche, not taking the time to discover that actually they don't make a silver one this year, they are making titanium and metallic grey but not silver; do you think that even people who know the porsche paint scheme will say that this mistakes takes them out of the story because this tiny detail uses slightly the wrong word? And that's what I mean about research and time wasting. I'm sorry that you mistakenly placed a tubor on the wrong continent but I doubt you intend to say that every time anyone peels a vegetable you have to go and rigorously research the dates that they arrived in that location. Here's the bottom line; some things matter some things don't. Knowing which ones matter is the skill here. You need to take the time to research when it matters, but only when it matters. Otherwise you should be writing. Or editing. Or doing anything that actually matters to your book. Because, in the end, books are only written by writing them. Researching whatever takes your fancy isn't wasted time set against the rest of your life and indeed random bits of knowledge make you a better person. But when you are supposed to be writing and you are doing a thing that is not writing? That's procrastinating. To take my own arboreal research; 'google search -> common trees Lake District -> Fur -> Image -> describe that image'. That took four minutes and frankly I'm outraged that's four minutes I won't get back. I hate to ask so indelicately; but how much of your work has benefited from your detailed knowledge of trees? Research is fine when you need to know. But when you don't it's another word for procrastinating.
I agree that research can too often become a procrastination tool. That said, I do find it frustrating, as a reader, when authors get stuff flat-out wrong. I think there's value in knowing when to gloss over things instead of researching them (like, do we really need to mention what year the Porsche is? If not, problem solved!), but if you're going to mention a detail I think it's important to try to get the detail right. For me, the most difficult aspect is not knowing what I don't know, if that makes sense. To go back to your Porsche example, it wouldn't be at all difficult for me to find out what colours a Porsche came in one year, but if I don't even know that they change colours from year to year, how do I know to check?
I had to look up which job would be best for embezzling and the most reliable way to hire a hitman. I like writing because I can use this research in every day life.
Honestly, I hadn't even considered where people would go. My story is largely about two people and their journey across the country, so you'd think I would've thought about it... Though my story also takes place a long time after that happened, so the country is starting to rebuild. But I guess I should have a plan just in case!
@LostThePlot All of my work has benifited from my detailed knowledge of trees. I am forever greatful to the botanist who reads my work and ensures I have absolutly no plant errors. He sent me the articles I needed late last night and I eagerly read them. In fact, after finding the frightful potato error, I suggested she send her work to him for a read through as well. Whenever anyone is writing they need to remember that details are important. Editors know what they're looking for and errors just make the writer look lazy. If you can't take four min to fact check why should the publisher spend any more than four min reading your work before dumping it in the trash? If you say you saw Venus at sunset, it had better be during a part of the year when Venus would be an evening star and not a morning star. If the kids are out back drinking Kool-aid, then Kool-aid needs to have been invented. And if your suspect sped away in a brand new silver mustang, then silver had better be an option. Why give an editor an excuse to trash your work? Writing is all fine and dandy, but writing inaccurate information will get you no where. I know my editor appreciates all the fact checking I do before sending him my work.
I really don't think editors are looking for excuses to trash your work. And you're paying your editor, right? So s/he had damn well better not be looking for excuses. Details are nice. Details are good. But I think it can be a mistake to get too paranoid about stuff. And really, if the writer doesn't know about the car colour, why would the editor?
@BayView Any outfit that asks you to pay for editing is a scam. If my work wasn't fact-checked and verified before sending it in, I'm sure I'd be shown the door. Sometimes I do get asked for my sources because if something can't be verified, it won't go to print.
Well, no, there are some completely legitimate freelance editors out there. They aren't scams. Are you talking about non-fiction, possibly? I agree that fact-checking non-fiction would be much more important than fact-checking fiction... But for fiction, I was under the impression that you haven't yet been through the editing process? Have I missed something? You got an offer, but nothing's been signed, so you wouldn't have an editor yet. So... who's the editor that's appreciating all your fact-checking? Clearly I'm missing something, but I'm not sure what it is.
It turned out that I needed a blind character. My only association with blind people has been to help them cross the street. I read some blogs by mothers of blind children and learned about blindisms—special things that blind children do that they have to learn not to do, such as pressing their eyes or rocking. If not stopped, the eye pressing can get so severe that the eyes are forced back into the face. The need to rock is so powerful that blind people wait until they are alone to do it. This was totally new and fascinating information.
Yeah, glossing over is extremely under rated and knowing when to do that is really what I'm talking about here. If it's a big deal the colour of the car, say this is how the hero recognizes the villain later on, then go find out what colours it can be. But if it's not then you can just not say which colour or just say 'silver', because most people talk about car colours that way. Did you know that every car paint has it's own trade name and it's own specific tone that is specific to the manufacturer? Well it's true. But even to people who are really into cars tend to use the laymans names. When you go to autotrader you'll see you can search for 'red' and 'black' even though no modern car describes it's colour that way. You say this like there's no other option than to use extremely precise names for everything. Why not just say 'bright star'? Why not just say 'juice? Why not just say 'car'? If someone is sitting teaching someone the names of stars then sure, absolutely, find out the right names. But that's easily done. Punch in a date and a place and you can find the names of the stars that'll be in the sky. Two minutes of work to add authenticity to a scene. But to go out and take an astronomy course just to write ten lines of dialogue? The important thing is to know which things really stand out. I live in the UK and we don't have Kool Aid here; you can't even get it at import shops. It would make British readers shake their head at you if you said the kids are drinking kool aid. But if you said they were drinking juice? No-one will care and you didn't have to even know if we have kool aid. And this begs the question why you are inclined to use such specific terms for things. We're talking about fiction, right? People don't read your books for the wonderful information about trees, they read for the characters and the plot. Also, why do you care if your editor appreciates it or not? She's not your audience. It's her job to catch your mistakes, it's not your job to make her job easy. Or the audience, in fact. You wanna know why I looked up ballet and gymnastics and circus acts? Because they were big parts of the characters I was writing and as I write for teenage girls it's very likely some of them have personal experience of gymnastics and ballet and most have been to a circus. It's important that when someone who is very similar to the characters I was writing sees a scene of Natalie practicing her gold medal routine that it passes the smell test to them; so that a girl her age reads that and says 'wow she's great at gymnastics'. I'm writing things within the collective knowledge of my audience, so I need to put the work in. But when I'm talking about how exactly Amy-Joy's dad pays for her to go to a private ballet academy I don't go and look up how hedge funds work because to my audience just 'He works in the city' is all it takes. He's rich and spoils his daughter, that's all they need to know. Now, I did go and look up which ballet academy she goes to, looked at what the daily routine is too so she can talk about her day to day life. But it doesn't matter where the money comes from. It's the same reason I'm ok saying her dad drives a black mercedes and give it no more thought. I'm sure some teenage girls know what cars come in what colours, but not so many that it's something I need to think about. And I doubt an editor would even think to check that detail either. If I was writing for young men then yeah, I'd absolutely get into the nitty gritty of what cars they drive, what engine, how much horsepower. But I'm not. Each audience has thing that they care about, that are within their typical sphere of understanding. Even for young men who don't know much about cars, they know enough to know that a ford fiesta is boring and a ford mustang is awesome. But for my girls? No, it doesn't matter at all. Hopefully editors understand this too, I've never worked with one myself but I really hope that they aren't sitting there all day trying prove is this specific tree should be a fur or a pine or an oak instead of looking for continuity errors or finding plot holes. As Bay says, sometimes it's hard to know what things you don't knows. It's easy to just assume that you know enough not to need to check. And yes, that's a skill; knowing what you don't know, knowing when things you don't know much about have more depth to them than you immediately presume. But going entirely the other way and presuming every trivial detail needs citations is just silly. You're writing fiction after all.
Okay, I know I need to let things go, but... I'm procrastinating! So... "I paid a grad student to proof read before sending mine out to betas and critiques. Once the critique process was finished I paid a professional copy editor to clean it up before I submitted to a publisher." - you, at https://www.writingforums.org/threads/proof-reading.151183/#post-1536882 and "I rely on both my editors pretty heavily....I think the reason I get on so well with my editors is that I know they are professionals and are dedicated to making my writing the best it can be, so I don't get "touchy" over things they suggest." - you again, at https://www.writingforums.org/threads/cant-give-my-books-away.151471/page-2#post-1542679 So have you changed your mind, now, and think that these editors were a scam? Or... Yeah, I'm lost.
You could make a pretty fun thread where people just list "things I've researched for my WIP", and the rest of us try and guess what the story is. Checking my browser history, it seems the last thing I was reading about was national parks of Ukraine. Huh. I've been thinking a lot about climate/flora/fauna recently as I try and get more detail for my setting, but I honestly don't even remember how I got into national parks.
I think that's part of the problem that leads to research being a procrastination tool! You start reading about something that you actually need to know a bit about, but then there's a link, and another link, and, oh, that's an interesting idea, you should just check up on that, and suddenly it's four hours later and you're an expert on Ukrainian national parks! Side note: I like seeing the ads that are produced as a result of my search terms. My first book was about a horse trainer recovering from the death of his lover, and somehow google or whoever picked up on the "horse" idea and the "death" idea and started showing me ads for large animal crematoriums! It was grisly, but kind of funny...
