Guest Post: Zoe Whitten on Research

My first guest poster on this new blog is Zoe Whitten author of several Indie and Weblit stories. Her latest premium ebook release is “The Sole Survivors’ Club” which is available on Smashwords, Mobipocket and the Amazon Kindle store. I will be posting my full review of the novel later on the blog later this weekend.

The Sole Survivors’ Club is well researched, so I invited her to write a guest post on the subject.

Over to you, Zoe…

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Research is a vital task in fiction, one that should never be overlooked. Writers are constantly reminded to write what they know, and it’s a safe bet that what you know probably isn’t sufficient for many of the writing projects you want to undertake. Research can help bridge the gap and make your stories more realistic.

There are, however, certain limits to research. For instance, you can learn all about shotguns by reading product information, but until you shoot one, the concept of the gun kicking back is an abstract. And how does kickback relate to gauge size? Is it a case of the smaller a gauge, the lower the kick? Or vice versa? Even here, you can fake knowledge by talking to gun enthusiasts to learn how your characters should react to firing a shotgun.

But let’s get even more abstract with a research problem I had last year while writing The Sole Survivor’s Club. I’d decided to write a story about “accident magnets,” people who are cursed to seek out deadly accidents. Bearing witness to death over and over, they had no idea why they kept seeking out such horrid catastrophes. The premise of the story came from a real person Violet Jessop, who served in different roles on board both the Titanic (as a maid) and the Britannic (as a nurse) when they sank. In reading her accounts of both boats sinking, I’d joked, “Man, I’ll bet no one would let her on a boat after that!”

But I started thinking more about the idea of accident magnets as a dark fantasy, and I decided to make a character drawn to multi-car pile-ups. I spent a few months pondering what would be the real cause of this curse before deciding to us the jinn, or genies. I wanted to make the main character one kind of victim, but there would be others, like a train conductor who crashed multiple trains. To add a sense of realism, I researched train wrecks and then suggested that he had been driving or riding a train in every single disaster.

My premise led to an interesting question: How does someone kill a jinn?

Research here was harder, because no matter which stories I searched for, there was no record of a normal human killing a jinn. There have been legends of demigods or magi who had done so with magical weapons or spells, but in this story, I wanted the protagonist to be a normal person who had no idea how to deal with these living spirits.

I went to my favorite forums to pick the brains of other writers, but no one had any ideas for how a normal person could accomplish this task. So I went back to online reading. My studies moved from Persian legends into Islamic texts, but that became even more frustrating because the listed “weaknesses” of the jinn read like assurances of the vast superiority of human beings.

However, this didn’t make my studies useless. I learned how not all jinn were evil, and I learned about the various jinn races; the sila, the ghuls, the ifrit, and the marid. I learned the limits of each race, and all of this would be useful for the story, even if it didn’t tell me how to kill one.

I won’t spoil my own story, but ultimately I came to the conclusion that sometimes, a writer needs to stop researching and fall back on good old fashioned bullshitting. Did it make the story less realistic? Well, not really, considering I’m telling a dark fantasy about genies who kill people with their own technology.

Research couldn’t give me the answer I wanted, but it did give me a wealth of information to pepper throughout the tale and lend it a greater sense of accuracy. Does the research make the story better? It depends on the reader, really. But as the writer, I think it helped give me a stronger idea of who these invisible spirits are, and why they do the things they do.

My roundabout point is, never be afraid to research your stories, no matter how fantastic the setting you plan to use. You might not get what you initially wanted out of your studies, but you will learn a lot of fascinating little details that will make your story stronger. And that can’t be a bad thing, can it?