The Outlandish Companion - Diana Gabaldon [155]
What you do then is: one, check the table of contents (if it has one); two, check the Index (if it has one); and three, flip hither and yon and browse a few pages. This will tell you what level of detail this book contains, and the scope of the subject matter covered. If it looks hideously boring, close the book and pick up another one. If you think a given library book might contain useful information, take it. Taking it out of the library does not oblige you to read it from cover to cover.
What you are doing here is simply discovering what kind of information each book contains. A lot of books may be superficially related to your topic, but not really useful—take them back to the library. Some will be perfect for your purpose—put these aside to be carefully read. Some will have useful information, but not look interesting enough to read: Put these aside to look things up in.
If you know that you will be dealing with a particular battle or political setting, then it makes sense to read detailed accounts of that particular event or setting. But if you need to know what kind of underwear women wore? Nah. You get a good book on costume, but you don’t necessary read the whole thing, cover to cover. You look up “underwear” in the index, find out what you need to know—and put the book back on the shelf until you need to know what sort of boots a gentleman would wear for riding.
The odd thing about doing any kind of library research—whether for scientific or literary purposes—is that once you begin searching, things start finding you. One thing leads to another; a bibliographic citation in a not-very-relevant paper will lead you to exactly the source you need; browsing in a general section of the library causes books to leap off the shelf at you.
(On one such browsing expedition, I happened to take a very heavy book from the shelf. I sat down on the floor to thumb through it, and when I glanced up from the table of contents—which had nothing very entertaining—what should I see, directly in front of my nose, but a book titled Muster Roll of Charles Edward Stuart’s Army. That’s just what it was, too; a list of all the men known to have fought with the Highland Army in the Rising of 1745. I found this book well after I had written Voyager, but out of curiosity, pulled it out and looked up the Master of Lovat’s regiment, which—like all the others—listed the officers first. It made the hair rise up on the back of my neck to see LIEUTENANT COLONEL: JAMES FRASER listed— though it rose still more when I turned the page and found Duncan McDonald and Giles McMartin on the next page (see beginning of Voyager, and the names of the men who were executed by the English after Culloden).
GENERAL PRINCIPLES OF DOING RESEARCH
Once you’ve dug yourself into the library and found a few promising sections of the stacks to mine, how do you proceed? In any way that makes sense to you, really—but in general, you might consider…
Overview
First, what do you need to know, in order to start writing? (You don’t have to figure this all out ahead of time—you may not know what you need to know, until you’ve been working for a while.) Some writers choose a particular period because they are drawn to it and already know quite a lot about it. Plainly their priorities will be different from those of someone who doesn’t know one damn thing about the time or place—like me. I began with total ignorance both of Scotland and the eighteenth century. All I knew was that at some point, men wore kilts—which was at the time a sufficient reason for choosing that period.
One danger of the “I must know everything before I begin” attitude is that it’s impossible to know everything—and the feeling that one has to know everything before writing is a nifty way of avoiding writing altogether.
As I