DragonOfTheAerie
Vala
O_O I'd have fired that sucker too...
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Living the Research
- Thread starter SeverinR
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O_O I'd have fired that sucker too...
Myth WeaverOpportunities for knowledge and inspiration are all around you, even now. You just have to adjust your perspective a bit.
Again, from my experience, more or less continued from my youth:
I grew up on the homestead. I built the house twenty miles to the south, on the outskirts of a small city (probably small town to most of you, or maybe village.) Half a mile west of me is bluff that drops 80-90 feet into Cook Inlet. South is an interconnected string of subdivisions with paved streets that eventually becomes a realm of malls, fast food joints, and the like. In the summer, I try to bike that distance every couple of weeks. North is a strung out collection of rural subdivisions, dirt or gravel streets, mixed in with the occasional machine shop or light industrial site. East...a few houses and roads to start with (along with a prison). Then dirt roads going nowhere. And after that, trees. Lots and lots of trees, with the occasional stretch of muskeg (former lakebed) thrown in.
Up to about six or eight years ago, I walked the decaying roads and trails through the area, sometimes a mile, sometimes several. My favorites included a long dirt road along the bluffs, and some of the trails eastward. Found a crashed remote control model airplane out there once. Scoped out 'Building 100,' a relic from the military days that was completely covered in graffiti that ranged from 'almost interesting' to 'somewhat obscene.' Kind of interesting to wander around such places. Then a subdivision got planted on the one road, and the other got gated.
So I started riding the bicycle, sticking mostly to the paved streets. Two or three loops around the subdivisions perimeter, about 1.5 miles per loop. Paid attention to the people I saw. Kids playing softball on a 'field' that includes part of the street and the front yards of two apartment buildings. Other kids playing hoops. Teenage couple necking on their porch. The guy trying to rebuild his junker car that's parked in the street. The perpetually feuding couple (squad cars every couple of weeks.) And so on. Point is, each of those encounters is either a story seed, or something that could be used in a story. This, in a fairly normal subdivision.
Can take a grimmer tone, too. Couple years ago, a couple in one of the apartment buildings on my circuit went missing, along with their toddlers. I'd see the kids, at least, once in a while on my rounds. I participated a bit in the search for them - in my wanderings, I'd found almost utterly forgotten places. Alas, the search was in vain, and the truth of that situation was revealed to be both much uglier and depressing than first thought. (MS). But I did learn a bit about the search procedures.
DragonOfTheAerie
Vala
To La Volpe (I hope I haven't misunderstood your posts because they're long): Firsthand experience totally can provide perspective just hearing someone describe something can't.
I think of like the telephone game. In telephone, the more people the message passes through, the more it gets distorted.
In the getting-hit-on-the-head example: if you were to get hit on the head like so and describe it, you would be directly transcribing your perception of the experience to the paper. The only mind it would have to pass through and be processed by is your own. But if you wrote about it by going on what Malik said it was like, you'd be farther away from the reality of the experience. You wouldn't have all the possible details because you heard Malik tell it, you didn't experience it for yourself. You wouldn't be processing your own perception of the experience to put to paper, you would be processing his description of the experience. You're much farther away.
The people on this forum are writers. Many people you might glean information from are not. Meaning they don't have the same ability to describe and articulate things. That compounds the difficulty.
But there are ways to circumvent the problem. You can draw information from lots of different sources to give a more complete picture. You can combine testimony with similar experiences you've had.
Anyway, all you really have to do is make your reader believe in it.
So, personal experience can be super helpful. But there are ways to get by as well without it.
I think of like the telephone game. In telephone, the more people the message passes through, the more it gets distorted.
In the getting-hit-on-the-head example: if you were to get hit on the head like so and describe it, you would be directly transcribing your perception of the experience to the paper. The only mind it would have to pass through and be processed by is your own. But if you wrote about it by going on what Malik said it was like, you'd be farther away from the reality of the experience. You wouldn't have all the possible details because you heard Malik tell it, you didn't experience it for yourself. You wouldn't be processing your own perception of the experience to put to paper, you would be processing his description of the experience. You're much farther away.
The people on this forum are writers. Many people you might glean information from are not. Meaning they don't have the same ability to describe and articulate things. That compounds the difficulty.
But there are ways to circumvent the problem. You can draw information from lots of different sources to give a more complete picture. You can combine testimony with similar experiences you've had.
Anyway, all you really have to do is make your reader believe in it.
So, personal experience can be super helpful. But there are ways to get by as well without it.
@DotA, I'm no help at all with emotional crises, but I can tell you this much: more than one famous author was writing at your age. This includes Isaac Asimov and Ray Bradbury. There are others. So no, you do not necessarily have to put on more miles before you can be a "serious" writer.
DotA's latest post (hope you don't mind being abbreviated!) gave me a clue as to why I keep being bugged on this thread even though I fundamentally agree with most of the points. It's that bit about firsthand experience providing perspective.
Yes it does. It provides *a* perspective. Just one. The part that bugs me is the assumption that the perspective is closer to some truth. It is closer to the experience of the person experiencing. That's pretty much it. And it can be as skewed as any other.
The parallel that struck me is with eyewitness accounts. Everyone knows about this, right? Eyewitness accounts--the same people experiencing the same thing at the same time--can vary in surprising ways. As a historian I deal with this all the time. One of my jobs is to weave a coherent account out of the various sources available. My account is its own interpretation, its own truth, which is taken by my readers (all sixteen of them) where it morphs still further. Other historians write their own accounts. But it would be a mistake to say that the account from the primary sources is closer to some absolute truth than is a modern account, simply by virtue of being closer in time and space to the event.
So it is with experiential research. It's not really closer to the real thing. It brings *that* researcher closer to *that* event. It provides *a* perspective, and the writer will use that to write *a* story. Another writer will draw on other sources and will write a different story.
And I certainly would not say (looking at you, DotA) that one needs to wait to experience things before one starts writing about them. Start writing now! Right now! Stop reading my ridiculously long post! Go write!
Yes it does. It provides *a* perspective. Just one. The part that bugs me is the assumption that the perspective is closer to some truth. It is closer to the experience of the person experiencing. That's pretty much it. And it can be as skewed as any other.
The parallel that struck me is with eyewitness accounts. Everyone knows about this, right? Eyewitness accounts--the same people experiencing the same thing at the same time--can vary in surprising ways. As a historian I deal with this all the time. One of my jobs is to weave a coherent account out of the various sources available. My account is its own interpretation, its own truth, which is taken by my readers (all sixteen of them) where it morphs still further. Other historians write their own accounts. But it would be a mistake to say that the account from the primary sources is closer to some absolute truth than is a modern account, simply by virtue of being closer in time and space to the event.
So it is with experiential research. It's not really closer to the real thing. It brings *that* researcher closer to *that* event. It provides *a* perspective, and the writer will use that to write *a* story. Another writer will draw on other sources and will write a different story.
And I certainly would not say (looking at you, DotA) that one needs to wait to experience things before one starts writing about them. Start writing now! Right now! Stop reading my ridiculously long post! Go write!
DragonOfTheAerie
Vala
Sounds like a really interesting place to grow up and live.
I'm thinking of my own experiences, things I can maybe turn into story fodder...
1. Everyone I know is eccentric. I literally don't know a single normal person. I'm thinking of my loopy art teacher telling of his time working in a donut factory, or the time his daughters threw him a colonoscopy party... I could tell so many stories. My friends are odd, colorful people who don't fall into any categories. People are so strange. I write everything down, weird things I hear people say, the stories they tell. Because you can't make any of it up.
2. I've owned lots of cats. I am a cat person. I've seen them give birth, I've raised kittens up from a bottle. I could tell you literally anything about cats. That's why giving dragons behavioral traits similar to cats' is a smart idea for me...
3. Being homeschooled. This is a big one because I can't think of a single book that depicts it accurately. It's always either a borderline cult or some kid has a deathly health problem and has to be sadly homeschooled and isolated from reality. Believe it or not, there are actually parents who do it just because they think they can educate their children better than the public schools can. (Like my own.)
4. Living with an anxiety disorder. Panic attacks, or, almost worse, the vague feeling of impending doom stalking you. I know how it feels, I know what it's like, I know the symptoms. I know about feeling like your brain is a prison trying to suffocate you. Unfortunately.
5. I've done quite a bit of gardening. It all died, but still.
Despite thinking of myself as being a suburb dweller, I probably know a lot more about the outdoors than a lot of people...I've lived in many rather rural areas.
I guess I could tell you quite a bit about my part of the country since I've lived here my whole life. But I don't know if I'll ever set a story here. Onwards...
6. Have been to dozens of churches, have been a preacher's kid even. I know about the power structures within. I know the good people churches contain, and the good people they screw over. Growing up Christian has given me insight into the Christian subculture.
Does any of this help me in a fantasy novel? I don't know...
7. Places I've been. Caves and waterfalls I've visited, trails I've hiked, farms I've played on, old houses I've lived in, thickets woods I've waded through, beaches I've vacationed at. Abandoned houses and buildings...I live near a river, so there are so many that flooded long ago and were never torn down...I've passed by some of them hundreds of times and wanted to explore each time. Have never gotten the opportunity though...
All the places I've been to have had such an impact on me. My dreams are always about settings.
8. I've only been taking Krav Maga for a few weeks, but I feel that soon it might be something to draw from.
9. Ok, I've never been in a relationship, but I have fallen hard for someone, and I've had my heart broken. Laugh all you want but it's something I know.
10. Miscellaneous: getting one's feet absolutely shredded to pieces after tangling them in thorns wearing sandals. Sinking in mud past your ankles and getting stuck, getting a shoe sucked right off your foot by mud. The smell of blood. The feeling of always being alone and misunderstood. Floating on one's back in a warm pool at dusk, watching the bats swoop about as the first stars come out. How exhausting clambering through deep snow is, almost like wading through water, how hard it is to catch your breath in the cold. Looking at the clouds...I gain so much inspiration from clouds. They are a source of unending inspiration. All the funerals I've been to, the sounds of utter grief and the solemn, churchy smell. Waking up in the middle of the night in a fierce thunderstorm, just as a bolt of lightning hits, shaking the house with a noise like a mountain splitting. Grooming a horse. Getting climbed on by a goat. That clenching feeling of dread before a punishment. Coming home to find a litter of kittens on your back porch mauled to death by the neighbor's dog and being so angry, at the universe, at dogs everywhere, wanting someone to pay, anyone. Finding a baby bird dying on the back patio and wanting to put it out of its misery but not knowing how, so just waiting for it to die...ugh, horrible. Making friends, fighting with them, keeping it together anyway. The feeling of pure exhilaration when you're driving down the road at night with your friends, singing at the top of your lungs to "Don't Stop Believing." Waking up from a nightmare and not wanting to go back to sleep. Midnight snacks. Growing up with brothers. Hating them half the time but being ready to beat the crap out of anyone who lays a hand on them. Frantic apologizing when you hit them a little *too* hard. Just memories I have, things I know. Just a few of them. Mostly normal things.
No really special things, but that's the point. The more I consider it, the less I think it's about experiencing and the more I think it's about remembering and processing and utilizing your experiences. My experiences are kind of mundane, but I could use them to inject depth into my stories nonetheless. I think you can gain a lot if you just keep your mind and senses open. Remember everything. I have lived in a constant state of "How can I use this in a story?" for several years now. I don't think I'm the worse for it. It's easy to let all your seemingly useless memories sluice into the background, but I try to hold onto things. I think that makes all the difference in the world.
And it's always the worst, the strangest, the most shocking, the happiest, the most painful, the most infuriating, the most embarrassing, the most exhilarating, the most beautiful...that's what will help you most.
One last thing: Personal research vs. impersonal. Pure information is just information. If you can hear something right out of a person's mouth, hear it the way they tell it, it will be so much more helpful. If you talk to someone, you'll hear a story rather than facts. You'll get the emotion, the humanity of every experience. That's why other people are the next best source other than yourself.
This post went way off topic. It's 2 A.M. I'm so tired. My brain is not working.
Let's not forget Christopher Paolini. I'm certain he was even younger than DotA when he started writing Eragon.
Russ
Istar
DotA's latest post (hope you don't mind being abbreviated!) gave me a clue as to why I keep being bugged on this thread even though I fundamentally agree with most of the points. It's that bit about firsthand experience providing perspective.
Yes it does. It provides *a* perspective. Just one. The part that bugs me is the assumption that the perspective is closer to some truth. It is closer to the experience of the person experiencing. That's pretty much it. And it can be as skewed as any other.
The parallel that struck me is with eyewitness accounts. Everyone knows about this, right? Eyewitness accounts--the same people experiencing the same thing at the same time--can vary in surprising ways. As a historian I deal with this all the time. One of my jobs is to weave a coherent account out of the various sources available. My account is its own interpretation, its own truth, which is taken by my readers (all sixteen of them) where it morphs still further. Other historians write their own accounts. But it would be a mistake to say that the account from the primary sources is closer to some absolute truth than is a modern account, simply by virtue of being closer in time and space to the event.
So it is with experiential research. It's not really closer to the real thing. It brings *that* researcher closer to *that* event. It provides *a* perspective, and the writer will use that to write *a* story. Another writer will draw on other sources and will write a different story.
And I certainly would not say (looking at you, DotA) that one needs to wait to experience things before one starts writing about them. Start writing now! Right now! Stop reading my ridiculously long post! Go write!
To pick up on your historian's analogy...I would suggest experiential research is a lot like working with primary sources. Sure they can be biased and inaccurate but they offer some value that secondary sources cannot.
I don't think there is any doubt that experience is not universal or that experience does not offer access to some universal truths. But it is your experience and is authentic. I think DOA articulated quite well how getting information through one or more sets of filters can water down that experience.
And if you are relating, as well as you are able, your own unfiltered experiences, you are offering something to your readers that is uniquely yours, not just something you borrowed from someone else.
Russ
Istar
Russ
Istar
The great fantasist Michael Moorcock was making his living writing fiction at age 17 IIRC. He also wrote Tarzan stories long before he ever visited Africa.
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Mythic Scribes is a community comprised of writers with different perspectives and goals
Please remember that these and other differences are welcome at Mythic Scribes. What unites us is a shared love for the craft of writing, and we can't lose sight of that.
Therefore, it is imperative that everyone treat one another with mutual respect. Please refrain from arguing, and instead focus on helping one another to grow and improve. If you must disagree with someone, do so with respect and tact.
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Finally, do not forget the Guiding Principle upon which Mythic Scribes is built:
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- Thread starter
- #92
SeverinR
Vala
We are all offering our views on how to improve on writing. What works for some won't work for others. What works for some might not work for anyone else.
For every "rule" someone offers, someone else has succeeded while breaking that rule.
We have published authors, we have people that have made good money from their work. But we are all still just giving opinions. No one should offer an opinion as if it is gospel, and no one should feel attacked for offering an opinion.
Even the successful published author succeeded his/her way and doesn't mean that will work for everyone, or maybe won't work for anyone else.
Basically, I'm saying we're all equals in this forum. We're all here to learn or improve ourselves and help others see from a different perspective.
Also we are all human and don't say things perfectly. My OP was not meant to say "Living the research" was the only way. I do live as much as I can, not only for writing research but for the experience too. I won't jump out of a mechanically sound airplane, so I won't live the research of a free fall or how it feels to ride a parachute down.
Can you write without living it? Yes. Can you do it well? Probably. Can you add something to your story if you lived it? Probably.
I will say it again, Please try to encourage and inspire people with your posts here, offer a special perspective on a subject. That is what makes this site great.
For every "rule" someone offers, someone else has succeeded while breaking that rule.
We have published authors, we have people that have made good money from their work. But we are all still just giving opinions. No one should offer an opinion as if it is gospel, and no one should feel attacked for offering an opinion.
Even the successful published author succeeded his/her way and doesn't mean that will work for everyone, or maybe won't work for anyone else.
Basically, I'm saying we're all equals in this forum. We're all here to learn or improve ourselves and help others see from a different perspective.
Also we are all human and don't say things perfectly. My OP was not meant to say "Living the research" was the only way. I do live as much as I can, not only for writing research but for the experience too. I won't jump out of a mechanically sound airplane, so I won't live the research of a free fall or how it feels to ride a parachute down.
Can you write without living it? Yes. Can you do it well? Probably. Can you add something to your story if you lived it? Probably.
I will say it again, Please try to encourage and inspire people with your posts here, offer a special perspective on a subject. That is what makes this site great.
KBA
Dreamer
Some real life experiences can be toned down to save time and money for those who don't have the budget yet. At least they create material for detail that can include all the senses. - An authentic Chinese restaurant owned by a Chinese family rather than traveling to China (no, not home delivered take-out Chinese). The scents, the flavors, the inflection and mannerisms of the family. - Videos on horse care including diseases and training, then visiting a county fair to see horses up close including aromas, bugs flying around the manure, their snorts, the feel of the muscle under the rough or sleek coat, the soulful eye contact. - Six Flags Nitro ride to feel the brief sensation of being weightless, or other rides to at least experience being closed up into a small container that goes from motionless to high speed within seconds.
- Thread starter
- #95
SeverinR
Vala
Also you can see what needs to be done and time it takes to care for a horse or livestock. See the interaction of horse and person, good and bad.
Exactly, finding ways to experience what our characters lived. It will add spice and reduce the chance for a "basic" error of nature.
C. A. Stanley
Minstrel
Nothing pathetic about that, Dragon. I recommend you use those feelings in your writing. Most people have anxiety, of varying degrees, so it's highly likely your characters will too. I've never read about a protagonist who suffers from panic attacks, but it would certainly provide good conflict and realism - a big fight scene is coming up, and your MC doubles over, can't breath, and feels like they're dying before the fight has even begun? Does a friend help see them through it--so they can continue on and fight the battle, admittedly weakened--or tell them to sit this one out? Does a character with social anxiety suddenly find themselves forced to engage in political affairs, surrounded by vapid, judgemental elites?
I suffer from anxiety / depression myself, and my persistent full-body pain means I'm too scared to get out and do things, so I use my imagination and empathy (and a lot of research!) to generate ideas and create detail. Physically doing something is almost always going to be the best way to understand it, but it's not the only way. I've never been to a desert, but I've been on a beach, and can extrapolate from that aha
Obviously technical things are going to be more complicated (swordplay etc), but the mind is an incredibly powerful thing, and given the right information, can figure these things out just enough to make somebody believe you know what you're talking about.
Malik
Auror
About three weeks after I wrote this, I received the first of what has become a concerning raft of emails and messages suggesting that the world where my series happens is real. The common thread in these messages has been that there's no way I could know so much about all this unless I've been there.
One reader sends me these long, Dr. Bronner-esque emails, absolutely convinced that I was part of a Black Ops program guarding a magic portal -- he's gonna lose his freaking mind when I get to Book IV and
introduce an ex-Green Beret-turned-stuntman associate of the MC to help him run a counterterrorism operation.
A couple of others -- messages and reviews -- have been much more subtle, mentioning how real the world feels, and how it reads like I've been there myself. And then, a few weeks ago, I found myself in an increasingly weird conversation with a guy at Norwescon who I really hope was high as shit and kept pressing me on the mechanics of how the characters got back and forth between worlds. I finally broke contact when he started asking how my sword got its patina and all those dings.
At first, I was sure I was being trolled, but at this point, if I am, then it's by a well-organized and dedicated group. I have come to the conclusion that there's a subset of fantasy readers who are just flat-out nuts.
I brought this on myself. As I've discussed on these boards, I took deliberate pains and used a lot of narrative tricks to make the book seem hyper-realistic, past the research and the intentional demolition of expected inaccuracies. The big thing is, I wrote it in omniscient third, crafting a narrator who's constantly dropping hints that he's been there and knows the characters, but who never drops into first person. The narrator just knows all this stuff. It reads like a memoir, like someone's sitting in your living room with a drink in his hand telling you all this. Nobody writes in omniscient third anymore, so this might have taken some people by surprise, and some readers who don't know any better might even construe it as a first-person account.
It's all a trick. All of it. It's sawing a woman in half onstage. Flowers out of a handkerchief. But coupled with the amount of research I put in, I appear to have exactly pulled it off. And as of this week, Dragon's Trail is an international bestseller, so I'm preparing for a whole new deluge of weird.
DragonOfTheAerie
Vala
I know it must be kinda perplexing and annoying from your point of view but this to me is hilarious.
And yes plenty of fantasy nerds are probably flat out nuts.
At least some folks already know this, but it's fairly cool. When Tom Clancy wrote The Hunt for Red October back in 1984, it was a huge hit. (It was also his first novel, which should thoroughly depress all of us)
The novel was so accurate, some people in the intelligence community thought he must have insider information and openly accused him of revealing secrets. In fact, everything he wrote about was available to the public. He simply did really good research. The original publisher of the book, in fact, was the U.S. Naval Institute.
Anyway, he didn't have to go on submarines, but he did have to do his research. Personal experience is great, but even that is useful only when approach as another piece of research. It has to be processed through the novelist's eyes and ears. And heart.
The novel was so accurate, some people in the intelligence community thought he must have insider information and openly accused him of revealing secrets. In fact, everything he wrote about was available to the public. He simply did really good research. The original publisher of the book, in fact, was the U.S. Naval Institute.
Anyway, he didn't have to go on submarines, but he did have to do his research. Personal experience is great, but even that is useful only when approach as another piece of research. It has to be processed through the novelist's eyes and ears. And heart.
C. A. Stanley
Minstrel
I started reading this yesterday. Half the time I have no idea what you're talking about. In a good way. Your knowledge of all-things-sword is both refreshing and inspiring.
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