On the Space Between Knowledge and Imagination

Or, on getting caught up in the likelihood of May rainstorms.

Photo by Mehmet Ali Turan on Unsplash

Recently, I've had three separate conversations with three separate people about how much is too much when it comes to research. It's a good question, I suppose. And, like all good questions, it's probably not an easy one to answer.

Research, of course, is a vital part of writing fiction. I think that's true whatever genre you're writing in, but some types of stories are likely to require more than others. One of the most important jobs a writer has is to tell their story in a way that makes it feel real (isn't that one of the great paradoxes of fiction? It's a kind of make believe that only works if it feels like it really happened.) It takes research to build fiction that feels authentic. In my experience, it's often the tiniest details that make things come alive.

I do most of my research as I go along. A lot of this happens outside of my writing time, but some of it happens right in the middle of it (halfway through a sentence, usually). Often there are general topics that I know I need to discover more about – historical health treatments, the response to the Spanish flu pandemic, how people celebrated Armistice day 1918 – and this reading happens in the time around my writing. Sometimes, however, I stumble across a need for a specific detail that the next sentence will hinge on, and I don't feel like I can go on until I've found it. The questions I've found myself pressing up against  this last week have been as follows: what exactly did post-WW1 wedding dresses look like? How did treadle sewing machines work? What was the weather like in the spring of 1919?

In the moment, all of these questions felt vital enough for me to drop the threads of whatever I was writing and head straight to Google. I knew I needed to be able to shine a light on the vague images I had in my head in order to properly be able to translate them to the page. For example, I'd sat my character down at her sewing machine, but without a full understanding of how the treadle mechanism worked, I couldn't quite picture the exact movements she'd need to make, and thus how well she might fare in the attempt. (Thank goodness for fashion historians on YouTube).

Of course, if doing research is like climbing the peak of a mountain, there's definitely a risk of tumbling down the other side. Stepping out of a writing flow to check one or two pressing details might help to make our characters shine... but stepping out every other sentence is only likely to stall our progress. We need to know the boundaries of the world in which our stories take place (whether that's a historical period, an industry or a fantastical universe) in order to build a story within it, but its easy to end up using those boundaries as a crutch rather than as a jumping off point.

There's also a danger of becoming so constricted by our knowledge of the facts that we don't leave any space for our imagination to step in. I teetered at the top of that particular rabbit hole with the 1919 weather reports. I'd read a snippet of a detail in a non-fiction book about the winter of 1918–19 being one of the coldest of the twentieth century, and that little snippet brought me further into my characters' reality. But then I got carried away and began to look up weather reports of how much rain fell the following May in order to determine whether or not a roof could've started leaking at that time. Reader, I'm prepared to admit that was TOO FAR.

When we find ourselves in these rabbit holes (please tell me I’m not the only one), I think it's important to remind ourselves that the primary purpose of fiction is to tell a story. And though it does need to be believable, it's also okay to make things up. No, more than that: it's kind of a requirement.

It seems to me that, like possibly everything else in life, this is all about balance. We have to weigh up the facts and historical knowledge that make a story feel authentically of its time, while also knowing when its okay to invent and imagine. Sometimes the truth needs to be simplified or streamlined to make it work in a story. Sometimes the absolutely wonderful little nuggets of research that made things clear in our own minds don't actually have a place in the narrative itself. Sometimes it's fine – and right! – to bend the historical facts in a way that allows our plot to find a way through.

Of course, I'm not really saying we should let obvious anachronisms into our stories. Unless we're writing something deliberately subversive, our readers are unlikely to suspend their disbelief of a Tudor heroine discussing gravity or a Regency hero rushing off to telephone his nylon supplier. But allowing for a bit of factual flexibility in a way that feels believable and – most importantly – allows the story to play out in a satisfactory way, is a very different thing indeed.

In other words: I'm going to keep my rainstorm and my leaking roof, despite the fact that I now know May 1919 was an exceedingly dry month.