Brilliant stuff from Ursula K Le Guin in her revised edition of Steering The Craft: A 21st-Century Guide to Sailing The Sea of Story — the bold type is my doing:
“Study this piece of false history and invented information till you’re familiar with it. Then use it as the foundation of a story or a scene. As you write the scene, compost the information: break it up, spread it out, slip it into conversation or action-narration or anywhere you can make it go so it doesn’t feel Lumpy. Tell it by implication, by passing reference, by hint, by any means you like. Tell it so readers don’t realise they’re learning anything.”
How much research to do, and then what to do with it, has always been something I’ve struggled with, no matter whether I’m writing for theatre, writing prose, shaping the texts for exhibitions, or anything else.
There’s always a feeling that you’re supposed to do research and to a point, that seems fair enough, if you want — or more importantly need — your work to be factually correct. The telling of certain kinds of stories (in any artform) is obviously strengthened by a skeleton of diligent research, which often prompts people to respond to such stories with words like “truthful”, “authentic”, “accurate” and “realistic”.
But it’s very easy to fall into a trap of treating research as a supply of ready-made material to shovel straight into your book/story/show, something which needs no editing, no filtering, no alteration — as if it were the fertile soil out of which a satisfying reading/viewing/listening experience can be naturally expected to grow all by itself.
It’s also easy to fall into a trap of simply top-dressing the surface of your story with a layer of research and then leaving it there — a bit like a mulch scattered around a rose bush. Used this way, the work isn’t being nourished by the research — the two things remain separate, and no organic links form between them.
If we writers are all honest with ourselves, because I think we’ve all been guilty of it at some point of another, we sometimes take the soil or mulch approach because we more or less consciously want to make sure the reader/viewer/listener will notice that we’ve done our research and we want to make sure they appreciate us for it.
I’m making a conscious effort to focus on Le Guin’s compost approach to research in future, to the point where I’ve already started asking myself, “Am I composting, soiling or mulching here?” while I’m revising a draft of my current novel and while I’m thinking about what’s going into the next two.
