The Outlandish Companion - Diana Gabaldon [157]
Sometimes you find Dover reprints in regular bookstores—particularly the coloring books, which are really excellent (and entertaining) reference material. I have a coloring book on “Colonial Trades,” for example, that illustrates all the common objects to be found in the shops of a cobbler, wainwright, tinsmith, silversmith, etc., and another on “Uniforms of the Revolution.” But the more obscure materials are usually available only through specialty shops or by catalog order.2
Organizing Stuff
Once you are well embarked on your research, the problem arises of organizing and keeping track of it all. Now, here I am afraid you are talking to the wrong person. People often ask me how I organize all the voluminous research required for one of these monstrous books—to which the answer is, “Well, see those three bookcases over there? Most of the stuff I use is in them.”3
The horrid truth is that I don’t organize things, beyond putting all the herbals on one shelf and all the books about magic on another. I don’t normally write down anything except the actual text of the novel I’m working on.
I mentioned earlier that there are differences between doing scientific research and novelistic research, and organization of material is one of them—at least for me. When I did scientific research, I kept index card files, and (later) databases of references, because when you write scientific papers, you have to be prepared to back up every single factual assertion with either a) a citation of someone else’s work or b) your own data.
When you write historical novels, you don’t. In fact… you can sometimes make things up! Which is one of the major inducements for writing fiction, if you ask me.
However. When you write scientific papers, you are normally dealing with a very limited and specific set of circumstances: You are interested, say, in the salinity preferences of the Chinese mudskipper, Periophthalmus chinensis (Gordon, Gabaldon and Yip, 1987). You will therefore start with a dual search: for general information on Chinese mudskippers and for references on salinity preference experiments.
You will attempt to find every single reference locatable in both categories, plus all relevant references to which these lead— and then to read them all carefully. This is necessary, if tedious; scientific research depends on accuracy of observation and replicability of results—and every new bit of knowledge rests upon a firm foundation of what is already known (we disregard for the moment the fact that such foundations shift now and then).
Since someone coming after you may wish to build on your work, you have to leave clearly marked trails and well-built walls; it’s a professional obligation. Consequently, you must include citations of all the work that you yourself used as background for your hypothesis and experimental design, and you must make this as complete and well integrated as you can.
You don’t do this with a novel. A novel stands alone; no one (other than possibly yourself, if you end up writing a series of books) is coming along after you, depending on your work to support later hypotheses.
ONE OF THE Ten Favorite Questions Interviewers Ask is: “How did you make the transition from being a scientist to being a novelist?”
“Wrote a book,” I reply tersely.⋆ If it’s a formal interview, though, I usually feel obliged to explain that the implied notion that science and art are diametrically opposing poles of human endeavor is mistaken. Many people think that science is logical, rigid, and cold, while art is intuitive, flexible, and touchy-feely. In fact, both processes are simply two faces of the same coin. Intuition feeds logic and vice versa. Science without imagination is useless; art without structure is pointless.
Both science and art ultimately rest on the same foundation: the ability to draw patterns out of chaos. It