In the same fashion, ongoing experience becomes grist for the mill. I can’t seem to enter a building without pondering how Bernie would enter it illegally. When I visit a museum I see not merely objects of artistic and historical significance, but things for him to steal. On a recent trip to London, a visit to the Sir John Soane’s Museum in Lincoln’s Inn Fields turned up a display of the photograph of a pistol which Soane purchased in the belief that it had belonged to Napoleon. It was actually an utter fake and the whole story about its provenance a pawnbroker’s fabrication; however, only the photo was on display because the actual pistol, fake or no, had been stolen from the museum in 1969.
I think I’d like that story even if I wrote nothing but stories about kittens and bunny rabbits for preschoolers. Given the kind of writing I do, I immediately thought of six different ways to work that item into fiction. I may never use it at all, but my writer’s eye and my writer’s imagination have taken a museum exhibit and turned it into the raw material out of which fiction may someday be fashioned.
Cultivating this habit becomes increasingly important the more time you spend in this business. Consider the paradox of the full-time professional writer: He writes out of his experience, using up his past, and the greater his success the less likely he is to store up useful new experiences. I don’t get a hell of a lot of fresh input sitting at a desk with a typewriter for company. And, while I derive enormous essential stimulation from the company of other writers, I don’t often get source material from them.
Happily, my inclinations are such that I spend a great deal of time away from my desk. My circle of friends includes people of all sorts, and their conversation puts me in worlds I’d never explore otherwise. Just the other day a policeman friend of mine told three or four stories that will very likely turn up in my work sooner or later; more important, his company sharpens and deepens my sense of what a cop’s life is like.
Some years ago a friend told me of an evening his father, then the manager of a Miami Beach hotel, had spent in the company of John D. MacDonald. As a long-time fan of MacDonald, I was very interested in knowing what he was like and what he’d had to say.
“Well, he didn’t have much to say at all,” my friend reported. “He got my father talking, and evidently he’s the world’s best listener. By the time the evening was done, my father didn’t know too much about John D. MacDonald, but MacDonald sure learned a lot about hotel management and the life history of Seymour Dresner.”
And that’s how it works. A lot of us enjoy holding court, sitting back and talking expansively about our work. It’s hearty fare for the ego, to be sure. But if instead we make a real effort to draw out other people’s stories, we’ll be using the time to good advantage, providing ourselves in due course with stories of our own.
The use of conversation just described is another example of the manner in which the writer is always working, even if he doesn’t know for certain what he’s working on or what he’ll ultimately wind up doing with it. Every conversation, every book read, every new place visited, is a part of the endless and all-encompassing business of nonspecific research.
Which in turn leads us — and I hope you’re paying attention to the facility with which I’m making these transitions — which leads us, then, to the business of specific research. We’ve seen a few of the ways to use what we know. How do we cover ourselves when it comes to something we don’t know?
Let’s go back to our hypothetical gothic novel, our widow’s tale of furniture appraisal on the moors of Devon. Having examined some of the ways we could change that story to fit our own areas of knowledge and experience, let’s suppose that for one reason or another we’ve considered them and ruled them out. Because of particular plot elements we like too much to sacrifice, we’re locked to the antique furniture business and the Devon location.
The obvious answer is research. Before you start to write, you have to learn enough about Devon and the antique trade to allow you to feel confident writing about them.
You do not have to become an expert. I’m italicizing this because it’s worth stressing. Research is invaluable, but it’s important that you keep it in proportion. You are not writing The Encyclopedia of Antique Furniture. Neither are you writing A Traveller’s Comprehensive Guide to Devon and Cornwall. You may well consult both of these books, and any number of others, but you’re not going to be tested on their contents.
On the whole, I don’t doubt for a moment that too much research is better than too little. Sometimes, though, research becomes a very seductive way to avoid writing.
Ages ago, before I began the first novel I’ve mentioned earlier, I decided that a historical novel set during the 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin would be a good first book for me to write. I knew nothing about Ireland in general or the Rising in particular, so I read several books on the subject. These made it clear to me that I lacked the necessary background. I decided it was important to begin at the beginning, and I decided further that I couldn’t properly grasp Irish history without a thorough knowledge of English history, whereupon I set about amassing an impressive library of books on the subject. You might well ask what a six-volume history of Britain before the Norman Conquest had to do with the purported subject of my novel; I can reply now, in retrospect, that I evidently found reading history a more congenial prospect than writing that novel, and that I found buying books an even more attractive occupation than reading them.
Over the years I did do considerable reading in English and Irish history, for recreational purposes rather than research, and I don’t doubt that it enriched my writing in various subtle ways. But I never did write that Irish novel and I doubt I ever shall. I didn’t really want to write it in the first place and used research as a way out.
George Washington Hill, the legendary tobacco company president, used to say that half the money he spent on advertising was a flat-out waste. “The trouble is,” he added, “there’s no way of telling which half it is.”
Research is a lot like that. For the mythical book we’ve been discussing, you would want to browse extensively in books on antique furniture, nibbling here and there, trying to get a sense of the antique business while deciding what type of furniture to deal with in the novel and picking up here and there some specific facts and labels and bits of jargon to give your writing the flavor of authenticity.
Some general reading along these lines, perhaps coupled with a few visits to antique shops and auction galleries, ought to precede the full-scale plotting of your novel, whether such plotting will involve a formal written outline or not. In this way the perspective of your research will very likely enrich the actual plot of the book. Then, having plotted the book in detail, you can return for the pinpoint research, picking up the specific fact that you now know to be necessary for the book.
This is what I did with The Burglar Who Liked to Quote Kipling. In the original proposal for the book, I supplied a vague outline, explaining that Bernie Rhodenbarr, now operating a bookstore as a cover occupation, is engaged to steal an unidentified whatsit from one collector for another. During the idea’s gestation period, I decided to make the stolen item a book of some sort, figuring this would go nicely with Bernie’s cover as bookstore proprietor.