From: sasafw@dobo.unx.sas.com (Fred Welden)
Subject: Re: Reserach in Fiction
Originator: sasafw@dobo.unx.sas.com
Date: Tue, 28 Jul 1992 21:08:21 GMT
Organization: Dobonia


In article <7679.208924043@kcbbs.gen.nz>, Dion_Murphy@kcbbs.gen.nz (Dion Murphy) writes:
|It suddenly occurs to me that we are talking at cross purposes here, 
|what is research in fiction?
|I think the answer is that we have to define what we are writing about 
|and whether the technical details have a bearing on the story.
|I recall one piece I wrote about a guy visiting Toronto, in the evening 
|they had been to a business meeting and returned to the visitors hotel. 
|I looked at the map and decribed them driving back via the CN tower, 
|only I later found that what was three inches on the map was a 30 mile 
|car journey and totally stupid.
|
|If you are relying on a fictional background, no-one can fault you. 
|But if the real world has any knind of impact on the story then I think 
|you must pay some attention to what is factual and what is not.

I've always said you should do enough research to be comfortable with
your story.  You shouldn't be comfortable writing about a city you don't
know based on a reading of a street map when you didn't even check the
scale.  Forgive me for sounding harsh, but how did you intend to
describe any of the neighborhoods driven through, restaurants eaten at,
and so on?  Better to abandon the idea of Toronto and set your story
in "New Kent," or some other invented Canadian city.  If Toronto had
"any kind of impact on the story" I question why you were writing it,
given that you don't seem to know the city. 

|To say that we should damn the mistakes and get on with the book might 
|explain why publishing houses are so unwilling to accept un-asked for 
|manuscripts from amateurs who don't have the professionalsm to write 
|a good manuscript in the first place.

Two issues here:  

1) Publishing houses are so unwilling to accept unsolicited manuscripts
because there is such an unbelievable quantity of pure crap being
written that finding the jewel in the slushpile becomes a near
impossibility.  The company I worked for only considered Large Print
reprints of books that had already made it through the culling process
of other publishers and into the bookstores, and even there the
slushpile was both deep and mind-bendingly foul.  Mistakes that would
have been corrected by research don't enter into it--keeping your
characters' names the same throughout the book, being careful not
to repeat whole paragraphs of description and dialog, and the ability
to remember from one chapter to the next whether your heroine is 
inclined to faint or to belt someone would have improved most of these 
books immeasurably.

2) An amateur is someone who does what he does for the love of it,
while a profesional does what he does because he is paid for it.  
Neither has anything to do with quality in itself, although a true
professional spends no more time or effort on quality than is required
by the customer, while an amateur might simply because he is enjoying
himself.  The current English usage that tends to use "amateur" to mean
clumsy and "professional" to mean of good quality runs counter to
the words' derivations and their history.  There was a time not too
long ago when to be an amateur meant to take great pains with one's
art.

-- 
--Fred, or another blind 8th-century BC  |  sasafw@dobo.unx.sas.com
        Hellenic poet of the same name.  |