I'd Like to Phone a Friend

In my circle of friends and family, I am fortunate to know an electrical and a mechanical engineer, as well as an IT professional who owns his own small business. I say I am fortunate in this regard because I primarily write science fiction, and in my genre knowledge can lead to very dynamic and rich writing. The quality of a written work often depends in large part on the quality of the sources being referenced. This is the same whether writing a graduate thesis or a full length novel. The fact is the facts matter.

Setting aside surrealism and abstract thinking, when a skilled artist paints something, they do it with references, or material facts. They go visit the terrain they are painting, they have a subject in a chair or standing on a platform, the look at photographs to gain information. All of this happens before they even put down the first brush stroke. Comic book artists making doodles still use small models to draw the human form. Writing, whether academic or artistic, is the same. It can't exist without a foundation. It needs something to attach to, a baseline that your readership can operate in, and that can only come from research through various sources.

It boils down to Coleridge's reasonable suspension of disbelief. The reader is willing to step into the fictional world, but it is the writer's job to ensure that the world they are creating, no matter how fantastic, follows its own rules. It's easy to discount the importance of looking into tiny details, but these are what make a world of text spring to life. Thankfully, the internet has made this type of work easy and, at least to me, enjoyable. Let's be honest, there are some days when the story just doesn't want to be written, and sometimes a change of pace is necessary to stir up ideas. When I'm stuck, I'll instead turn to something I have in my book, something that needs more detail, and I'll spend time gathering up information on the subject. This can be as simple as running an image search through Google to figure out how certain cities look, or as in depth as reading an academic thesis published online.

Some of the best resources available, and the inspiration for this article, are your family and friends. Their life experiences, the work history, their personal interests, are all very relevant sources to mine for your writing. Spend time talking to them to improve your story, and you'll often find that their passion on a subject that you previously knew nothing about will inspire you in your work. It's important that you don't feel like this time spent researching is time wasted; on the contrary, it's time invested that will cause you to turn out a better novel than you could have originally hoped for, because you have expanded your knowledge base and put that into your writing. A small word of caution at the end: the key to all this is that we focus on the "reasonable" part of the suspension of disbelief. Let the details work for you in your story, but don't let the details become the focus. It's the missing the forest for the trees conundrum, but that's an entirely differ

A.C. Harrison
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