From Zen and the Art of Motorcyle Maintenance, by Robert M. Pirsig:
You want to know how to paint a perfect painting? It’s easy. Make yourself perfect and then just paint naturally.
From “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” a story by Jorge Luis Borges (translation by James E. Irby):
[Menard] did not want to compose another Quixote — which is easy — but the Quixote itself. Needless to say, he never contemplated a mechanical transcription of the original; he did not propose to copy it. His admirable intention was to produce a few pages which would coincide — word for word and line for line — with those of Miguel de Cervantes…The first method he conceived was relatively simple. Know Spanish well, recover the Catholic faith, fight against the Moors or the Turk, forget the history of Europe between the years 1602 and 1918, be Miguel de Cervantes.
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Edit to add (2009-09-17): If you’ve already read this post and the postscripts which follow it, you already know about the book Mrs. West’s Hats. The author/photographer has kindly given permission for me to use an image from the book, which I’ve added to the P.S.
How much research should a novel’s writer undertake? When you read a novel with scenes from the past, how “accurate” do you want or expect it to be? Is there such a thing as too much accuracy?
Questions like these are hard for me to answer.
As a reader, I don’t necessarily hold a novelist’s feet to the fire every time s/he mentions real events or real people from the past. If I read a fictional account of (say) the Battle of Britain in 1940, I don’t go off and check somewhere to see that a British Spitfire can really fly X miles per hour (as the author insists). I trust that the author has things at least approximately right, and that if it’s not right-right then at least (so I assume) the book’s plot — and history itself — wouldn’t be altered by having the additional information.
But as a writer…
I was telling The Missus the other day about a research problem (apparently insoluble via plain old Internet resources) which I’d encountered. For background, you may recall from a couple months ago my announcement that I finally had a real title for the work in progress. I got the title from a 1942 song, Seems to Fit, with words and music by one Tulley Leeson:
Leeson worked on the song starting sometime in June, 1942, and apparently finished it by sometime in the fall. A month or two later, he met a lounge singer, a young woman named Goody Goodelle. There’s a suggestion that the two had some sort of “relationship,” as the term goes. But in any event, Goodelle liked it (or Leeson) well enough that she offered to to break it in for him — give it sort of a trial run, before a paying audience.
So saying, she brought Leeson’s songsheet to her nightclub performance of November 28, 1942, at the Cocoanut Grove in Boston.
So now I’m writing the chapter of the book which describes the events of that evening. The main character in this chapter meets Leeson and Goodelle, and I found myself wondering what would be going through her head as she observed the two of them together.
The nightclub: I’ve got the floor plan of that, and I know where the table is in relation to the band and the dance floor. Tulley Leeson: I had no trouble at all describing him. But Goody Goodelle…?
What I’ve turned up about her is that she recorded at least one song, “It’s Better than Takin’ in Washin’.” I found a couple of Billboard Magazine reviews of performances in the mid-1940s which fill in the blanks, sort of. (“She’s a big, good-looking girl… her easy platform manner, her comic asides make her an especial favorite… And an insinuating lift of the eyebrow, or a lilt in the voice heightened interest.”) I learned that she was singing “Bell Bottom Trousers” when the fire broke out in the Cocoanut Lounge.
But I still don’t know, really, what she looked like. From some of what I’ve got, I picture her something like Eileen Brennan’s character Billie in The Sting. (Billie, the girlfriend of Paul Newman’s Henry Gondorff, makes several fleeting appearances in the 20-40 second range of the video below.)
But damn it: I want to see Goody Goodelle. I want to know how she wore her hair, whether she had a great or an undistinguished smile. I want to know what sort of clothes she wore when performing. I can’t find a picture of her anywhere on the Internet. (I hate it when that happens.) Heck, I want to know what her voice sounded like: Betty-Boopish? Lauren-Bacallish? Did she have a regional accent? Did she laugh with a belly laugh, or did she make little hee-hee-hee noises? Et cetera, et cetera, ad infinitum. (Ad nauseam, possibly.)
So I’m telling The Missus about this problem, and she not-quite clucks her tongue before saying, “That’s the kind of thing you loooove to research.” (She didn’t mean “you, John”; she meant “you” in the generic sense of “authors.” And yes, she knows the problem first-hand.)
So yeah, I know: I can just make the answers up, and do a convincing job, with close to 100% confidence no one will know any better. But I’m still not quite ready to throw in the towel…
It seems to me there are two ways to go about the problem of researching the past so you (generically!) can recreate it accurately, in the small, in your story. I’ve tried both of the following at various times:
- You can wait until a question comes up, and dig up its answer(s) on an ad-hoc basis, and repeat as often as needed until you run out of questions or the story is done, whichever comes first. I don’t like this approach much, because you must ask, well, pretty much every important question. Any question you don’t think of may be the one whose answer(s) make the whole thing right (or wrong).
- You can soak yourself in period details — music, art, daily events, clothing styles — so when you start to write your scenes, even if what you produce is not “factual” it will be “true” (maybe even truer, indeed, than what you’d come up with using the first approach). This comes at the situation from the outside in, from general to specific — inductively rather than deductively. But it does so at the expense of “answering” a whole lot of questions whose answers you don’t need to know.
(Solution #2, by the way, is the approach described in the quotations which open this post.)
What do you (non-generically!) prefer when it comes to fictional accuracy?
__________________________
P.S. While wrapping up this post, I got a cool email from the far side of the world, from a correspondent named Helen Couchman. Although I’ve never met her, we’ve exchanged a few emails (per a mutual friend) so that I could help her identify the sources of a couple of quotes.
Why mention this email here? Because of her new book, Mrs. West’s Hats. The Mrs. West of the title is Couchman’s grandmother; the book contains 60 photos of Couchman wearing Mrs. West’s many hats from the 1940s and ’50s — effectively donning something of her grandmother’s identity, “soaking herself in the period,” and to that extent becoming of the period. In short: approach #2, above.
Update: Here’s a sample image from the book, #26 in the series. (Image copyright © 2009 by Helen Couchman.)
Is that great, or what?
P.P.S. A wonderful book based entirely on the premise that we can literally travel to the past by soaking ourselves in its details is Jack Finney’s 1970 “illustrated novel,” Time and Again. Highly recommended.
DarcKnyt says
I don’t know if I have a preference; I’ve been in IT all my life but I’m much more forgiving of spec fic writers who make leaps about computer technology. Those writing from the past forward have a hard time getting it all right anyway, regardless of what it is.
And I’m not a history buff, so I don’t really hold people to a hard line on that either; they probably know more about it than I do.
What kills me is geographical references to places I’ve lived or have been. Get those wrong and the writer loses me. I don’t know why. I’m not a geography buff either; it’s just with places I know well, too.
But the writer must write to satisfy himself, not just the reader. Whatever approach and level of detail s/he feels is necessary for the story to be effective is where they ought to strive.
I’ve learned a lot about the field in which my protagonists dabble since I finished my first real manuscript. And I find I’m injecting more factual and less speculative information along the way as I edit. So there’s always a chance it will shake out.
But writing about someone for whom little or no information is available is a tough one. What can be done? The information can’t be spontaneously generated, and if it doesn’t exist, it doesn’t exist.
Whatcha gonna do?
marta says
As a reader it depends on what I know already. I mean, if I don’t know what is correct, I’m happy to take the writer’s word for it (though not necessarily enough to accept it as fact if I need such info. I might double-check). But I was watching a movie where a character said something about a man being Bulgarian. “He’s from Transylvania!” That annoyed me no end.
I research as something comes up. That’s it.
But it is funny. A friend of mine was stuck for an hour over not being able to find any information on what dragons eat. She isn’t willing to make it up. Luckily, I happen to have a book and dragons and am doing some research for her…
marta says
P.S. Reviews. If there is one place where writer error ruins anything for me, it is in reviews. Just tonight I came across a review for The 10th Kingdom. The reviewer’s plot summary didn’t agree with what I knew of the film. Oh, and one time I heard a review of a Harry Potter film and the reviewer mixed up a few quotes, and obviously hadn’t read the book.
It’s one thing if the reviewer and I don’t agree on a movie, but another thing if they just get the plot points wrong. Then I can’t take the review seriously.
recaptcha: angst wright
YEP!
John says
Darc: The sensitivity to fouled-up descriptions of places you know — that makes total sense to me. Places we’ve lived: those facts are personal, man; get them wrong and you’re not just trifling with truth, you’re trifling with me. Like that.
Before I read that line in Billboard about GG as a “big, good-looking girl,” the chapter had described her as a “pert little slip of a thing.” (I wouldn’t use those words myself; they’re words from inside the head of my character.) Whoops. On other stuff I come up with which I can’t verify, I’ll just have to hope someone doesn’t know better — or if they do, that they don’t mind.
IT-related spec fic: Have you read William Gibson? John Twelve Hawks? (The latter a pseudonym.)
marta: Transylvania, Bulgaria — that wouldn’t have been Practical Magic, would it? (No magic here: I cheated. Ha!)
Love your friend’s worrying over dragon food. The “not willing to make it up” gets me almost every time, especially if I’m convinced, like, Damn it — I KNOW the answer is out there somewhere!
Pre-Internet, I wrote a longish short story in which characters from southern NJ took a train to New York City in order to arrive by a certain time, in the 1930s. I knew a passenger-train line had run through the small town in question but became obsessed with knowing if they could in fact have caught a train in their town. But how to get it right…?
At the time, I myself still lived in NJ, so I went to the NY Public Library. Researchers in the Reading Room there, like me, would identify what book or other resource they wanted and write the info on a scrap of paper which got passed downstairs. A research librarian would get the request, find the material, and send it back upstairs via dumbwaiter. Using various directories and indexes, I learned that they actually had a copy of a train schedule from that month and year for the railroad line my guys would have had to use. When it came up in the dumbwaiter I was incredibly excited; the schedule had obviously not been used for decades, if ever, since it had been printed — the pages were literally falling apart as I handled them.
And it turned out that they couldn’t have gotten to NYC at the right time. So I had to rewrite that passage in order to get them first to the train station in Philadelphia (by hitchhiking).
That will probably always be my favorite research-for-fiction story. And bottom line? If I’d gotten the fact(s) wrong, no one but me would ever have known — or cared.
Reviewers who get key plot points fouled up and then hate a work which I love — oh yeah. And if the reviewers themselves are authors, they lose themselves at least one future reader for it!
cynth says
One of the things that sometimes stops me dead in my tracks is not knowing a certain police procedure for a crime and not knowing any police that I could ask without it looking like they would have to arrest me for something I actually hadn’t done, but was contemplating all the ramifications of. I think there’s a website that has police procedures on it, but in some instances it just didn’t give enough information.
If I get arrested for a crime I didn’t commit, I would at least have the data afterwards to write about that experience at least!
Froog says
There’s a great story about the French novelist Prosper Merimee first pitching an idea for “a Spanish novel” (which was later to become the super-bestseller Carmen) to his publisher. Apparently the publisher generously suggested making a small advance to fund a research trip, but Merimee replied something like: “Why don’t I just write the book, and then use the earnings from it to go there and see if I got things right?”
Of course, that doesn’t quite work with the past.
But really, I think you have to examine whether you aren’t just way too OCD about this research thing. Well, not so much about the research thing. If you feel you need to know all this stuff to help you visualize the characters and the settings better, well, fair enough. But do your readers really need to hear any of this stuff? Do we need a physical description of every bit-part character? Do we need to know how your characters got to this nightclub, or even why?
If you haven’t already read it, I recommend the opening chapter (opening few sentences) of Tristram Shandy as one of the most brilliantly funny dissections of why it is impossible to write a complete story of anything.
Helen Couchman says
Thanks for picking up on the book!
It is interesting what you say about “becoming of the period”.
In relation to your writerly research dilemma (Point 1. ‘Knowing’ or Point 2. ‘Becoming’) it was never the crux of my interest to “become” as such. I have heard many people talking about this in relation to their working process now I ponder your post here. It is a pertinent question. I am especially reminded of actors who when interviewed qualify themselves saying how they spent, I don’t know, six months working in a hospital so that they knew better how to act the nurse.
Research is very important, fun, (addictive to some to the point where they become all about restoration) but I feel that after all is read and referenced you can only successfully ‘become’ yourself on the page.
What I mean, sorry if I’m being obvious, is that the description of this singer, Goody Goodelle will become what you make of her. You could know many things about her or nothing but either way if your passion to communicate her drives you she will (and can only I suggest) become what you make of her.
Thanks again for your quote sourcing help. Whatever, you are a researcher extraordinaire however you choose to employ it.
PS
As you say the reader of your text is another problem/addition to your writing entirely. Also you and maybe readers at large, “…don’t necessarily hold a novelist’s feet to the fire… if…” ha ha ha
John says
cynth: I can’t remember the title, but there is — used to be — a handbook of criminal-investigation procedures which I used back in the early ’90s while working on a mystery; it’s actually a sort of manual for police (and private) investigators. Bet you could find a used copy via Amazon or Alibris for not-too-much do-re-mi…
I noticed you said “if” you get arrested for a crime you didn’t commit. If I were a suspicious law-and-order sort, I might wonder about the alternate meanings of that opening clause.
You’re probably right about the OCD. For what it’s worth, I think the chapter in question is pretty much done and — although quantifying it doesn’t make much sense — maybe 90% of what I learned doesn’t appear onstage, as it were. But it was all there in the wings and in the prompter’s box, waving its arms and reminding me of stuff to bear in mind while I wrote it.
It’s been a long time since I read TS. But I remember that opening section, all right. If a reader can get past that, he’ll want to finish the whole thing. :)
(Now, I have not read any Proust. But my understanding is that he encountered a similar problem, knowingly or otherwise: that if you try to record everything that ever happened to you, you’ll never finish — because the act of recording it all becomes one big thing-that-happened-to-you: the hall of mirrors effect.)
John says
Helen: The day I posted this here, a blog friend (Kate Lord Brown) coincidentally posted her take on the subject, at her site. She refers to the “becoming” approach as the “method” approach, which echoes your mention of method acting.
I don’t know that what you said was obvious — I myself hadn’t thought of so — but it was very wise advice, I think. It proved to be very much the way the chapter’s draft finally took shape. Goody Goodelle is on perhaps 2 of the 10 pages, but those brief appearances wouldn’t have felt right to me without the (as Froog says) OCDing about her.
Thanks again for visiting!
Nora says
Hello. I found this post after Googling my mom’s name: Goody Goodelle. Imagine my surprise! John, I’ve sent you an email and would love to hear from you.
John says
Nora: Knock me over with a feather!
I got your email message and will be replying later today. Thanks so much for the bolt out of the electronic blue!
Mr618 says
Someone has an old four-record set og Goody Goodelle recordings up on EBay (http://cgi.ebay.com/Goody-Goodelle-Her-Piano-Intimate-Songs-4-Rec-Albums_W0QQitemZ300365173241QQcmdZViewItemQQptZMusic_on_Vinyl?hash=item45ef28d1f9). I assume (with the usual caveat) that the photo on the jacket id Goody Goodelle.
BTW, I ran across your blog while doing some research of my own on the Cocoanut Grove fire.
Mr618 says
Oops, that should be “the photo… is Goody Goodelle.”
Shouldn’t try to type after only two cups of coffee.
Geraldine Dodge McQueen says
Googled Goody Goodele recently since she and her family were like family to me growing up in Dorchester, MA. I see above a “Nora” ,Goody’s daughter, who was named for her grandmother, Grammy Maclone. Grammy gave me the name Geraldine. I remember well when Goody was in the fire and how distressed we all were. She was black and blue for months from squeezing through the security bars at the Club to escape!!
Knew Grammy, Henry, Riva, Buddy (Michael), Goody and extended family. It was one of the most loving families to be part of and I have never forgotten them.
Goody and Riva would sing at the grand piana in the parlor and entertain us all – sometime we would sing along. I have other information if you would like it.
Geraldine Dodge McQueen