{"id":5661,"date":"2009-09-16T15:42:26","date_gmt":"2009-09-16T19:42:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/?p=5661"},"modified":"2009-09-17T12:30:05","modified_gmt":"2009-09-17T16:30:05","slug":"enough-is-enough-er-isnt-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/2009\/09\/enough-is-enough-er-isnt-it\/","title":{"rendered":"Enough Is Enough! (Er, Isn’t It?)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/p>\n

From Zen and the Art of Motorcyle Maintenance<\/em>, by Robert M. Pirsig:<\/p>\n

You want to know how to paint a perfect painting? It’s easy. Make yourself perfect and then just paint naturally.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

From “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote<\/em>,” a story by Jorge Luis Borges (translation by James E. Irby):<\/p>\n

[Menard] did not want to compose another Quixote<\/em> — which is easy — but the Quixote itself<\/em>. 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…<\/p>\n

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<\/em> Miguel de Cervantes.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

—-<\/p>\n

Edit to add (2009-09-17):<\/strong> If you’ve already read this post and the postscripts which follow it, you already know about the book Mrs. West’s Hats<\/em>. The author\/photographer has kindly given permission for me to use an image from the book, which I’ve added<\/a> to the P.S.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

H<\/span>ow 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?<\/p>\n

Questions like these are hard for me to answer.<\/p>\n

As a reader<\/em>, 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<\/em> 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<\/em>-right then at least (so I assume) the book’s plot — and history itself — wouldn’t be altered by having the additional information.<\/p>\n

But as a writer<\/em>…<\/p>\n

I<\/span> 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<\/a> that I finally had a real title for the work in progress. I got the title from a 1942 song, Seems to Fit<\/em>, with words and music by one Tulley Leeson:<\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

So saying, she brought Leeson\u2019s songsheet to her nightclub performance of November 28, 1942, at the Cocoanut Grove in Boston.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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…?<\/p>\n

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 <\/em>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.<\/p>\n

But I still don’t know, really, what she looked<\/em> like. From some of what I’ve got, I picture her something like Eileen Brennan’s character Billie in The Sting<\/em>. (Billie, the girlfriend of Paul Newman’s Henry Gondorff, makes several fleeting appearances in the 20-40 second range of the video below.)<\/p>\n

<\/object><\/p>\n

But damn it: I want to see Goody Goodelle<\/em>. 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<\/em>. (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<\/em> noises? Et cetera, et cetera, ad infinitum<\/em>. (Ad nauseam<\/em>, possibly.)<\/p>\n

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.)<\/p>\n

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…<\/p>\n

I<\/span>t 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:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. You can wait until a question comes up, and dig up its answer(s) on an ad-hoc<\/em> 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).<\/li>\n
  2. 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.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    (Solution #2, by the way, is the approach described in the quotations which open this post.)<\/p>\n

    What do you<\/em> (non-generically!) prefer when it comes to fictional accuracy?<\/p>\n

    __________________________<\/p>\n

    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.<\/p>\n

    Why mention this email here? Because of her new book, Mrs. West’s Hats<\/em><\/a>. 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<\/em> the period. In short: approach #2, above.<\/p>\n

    <\/a>Update:<\/strong> Here’s a sample image from the book, #26<\/a> in the series. (Image copyright \u00a9 2009 by Helen Couchman.)<\/p>\n

    \"\"<\/p>\n

    Is that great, or what?<\/p>\n

    P.P.S. A wonderful<\/em> 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<\/em><\/a>. Highly recommended.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","h5ap_radio_sources":[],"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"activitypub_content_warning":"","activitypub_content_visibility":"","activitypub_max_image_attachments":3,"activitypub_interaction_policy_quote":"anyone","activitypub_status":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[16,5,324,372,515],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-5661","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-themissus","7":"category-06_writing","8":"category-researchresources","9":"category-style-and-craft","10":"category-grail","11":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6kZSG-1tj","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5661","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5661"}],"version-history":[{"count":38,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5661\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5692,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5661\/revisions\/5692"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5661"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5661"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5661"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}