On Writing Romance_ How to Craft a Novel That Sells - Leigh Michaels [16]
Accurate research isn't important just for credibility. A few years ago I spent a couple of days in a medical library looking up case studies on carbon monoxide, so I could strand my hero and heroine and have them realistically sickened, but not permanently damaged. Not long after the book was published, I got a letter from a reader who had thought she was suffering from the flu until she read the story, recognized my hero's and heroine's symptoms in herself, and got treatment—just in time. Two days in a medical library was a peanut-size price to pay for saving a life.
In other words, do your research.
But where do you look, and what are you looking for? When you're drafting your book, you usually need two types of information—general facts you can use to shape your characters and story events when you're in the early planning phase, and more specialized information to ensure believability when you're in the writing phase. Let's take a close look at the various research options associated with each phase.
General Research Strategies
When you're planning your story, your first goal is to gather broad, sweeping, general knowledge about a place or a profession. This type of basic information helps you decide what your characters will do for a living, what events the story will involve, and—equally important—what sort of jobs the characters can't do and what couldn't happen in the story.
This general information typically comes from multiple sources, including many of the following:
Personal Experiences: The best kind of research is personal experience. There's no substitute for being there—and, of course, observing carefully. Obviously, if you want to write a Civil War novel, you can't go back and live in that time period. But you can go to Gettysburg and walk the battlefield, getting a sense of distance and direction and the way the ground lies.
If you're using your own experience, make sure it's both accurate and comprehensive. Jacqui Bianchi, editorial director of Mills & Boon during the 1980s, once (old of an American author who was so enamored of London during a tourist visit that she set a book there. Her heroine met the hero by tripping over a fire
hydrant and tailing into his arms; however, in her single week in the city, the author hadn't noticed that London fire hydrants are below ground, with the covers flush to the pavement. Though that's a fairly simple fix—the heroine could fall over any number of things instead, if she absolutely has to fall—some problems are a lot harder to repair after the book is written.
When it comes to using events from your personal experience—or, for that matter, factual material gleaned from primary sources, case studies, and interviews—it's safe, within certain limits, to have those same events happen to your characters. Just keep in mind that truth is sometimes stranger than fiction. Real life isn't required to be logical, but fiction has to make sense.
Other People's Experiences: The next best source, after your own experiences, is someone else's personal experiences. Find out what your friends are good at, where they've lived, and what they've done. What jobs have they held? Where have they traveled?
Cultivate sources like your lawyer and your doctor, the cop who lives down the street, the fireman who wants to sell you tickets to the annual ball. When you have a question for one of these professionals, you'll be able to phone and ask.
Keep track of what you hear at cocktail parties or the water cooler. Your coworker's reminiscences about his year in the Peace Corps may not fit into a story right now, but there'll come a day when you need specifics, and then you'll know who to call. (And if the person you need to ask already knows who you are, you won't face the problem one writer did when she phoned local drug investigators and asked how much cocaine would fit in a standard