Information-Seeking Behavior of Novelists in Archives

Archives are a frequently untapped resource for novelists. Accounts of daily life, the lives of individuals, details of specific eras, and other minutiae found in the documents and memorabilia housed in archives can be used to fill out the essential scenes and events of the stories. Such facts and personal details help fiction writers make their stories real to readers and keep misconceptions and factual errors out. This study looks at the limited literature on the subject of authors in archives and presents examples of the types of information housed in particular archives to illustrate the kinds of details that could be useful in writing fiction. This study also demonstrates to archivists ways in which they can help authors to become aware of the value of archives in their research and to help them find the documents that would be most useful, based in part on this author’s experience as a novelist, a member of several writers’ groups, and panelist at numerous genre conventions attended by writers, editors, publishers, agents, and fans. In order for archivists to know how to help writers of fiction in their research they must have an understanding of the needs of these writers and how they differ from the needs of more traditional researchers, such as academics, scholars, and genealogists. Most novelists and other fiction writers are quite familiar with researching in libraries and on the Internet, but they sometimes have little or no experience researching in archives or primary sources. They often begin working on a story with only a general idea of what it is to be about, and thus have only a general idea of what information they need or where to find it. Some articles were found for this study that compared the informationseeking behavior of historians and that of writers of fiction. In her essay on the similarities between the telling of history and the telling of stories, Nancy F. Partner says Fiction’s persuasive force, its “sense of reality,” results from an author’s ability to offer the reader a suggestive array of fictional elements that satisfy the requirements of possible reality in the shared world of writer and reader. The historian, using techniques that differ only a little from those of a novelist, has to persuade the reader not only of the possible reality of his array of 1 Osborne: Novelists in Archives Published by DigitalCommons@USU, 2010 verbal elements, but that those on display in the text are “guaranteed” by their relation (reference, logical inference) to things outside the text and thus the result is a real mimesis. One question authors of genre fiction hear often is “Where do you get your ideas?” For these authors, ideas are everywhere; but they are just the starting point. The story is in the details, getting the right feel in the story, making it real for the authors themselves and ultimately for the readers. As Margaret Atwood stated in a presentation in 1996, “This fictional world so lovingly delineated by the writer may bear a more obvious or a less obvious relation to the world we actually live in, but bearing no relation to it at all is not an option.” Authors often place their stories in a real place or historical moment or era. Once, a reader whose “guilty pleasure” was Regency romances (which are set in the period between 1811 and 1820) was reading a novel by an author with whom she was unfamiliar. In the story, the main character picked up the phone to make lunch arrangements with her friend. A little research would have told the author that telephones were invented decades after this period. And that reader never picked up a book by that author again. In another case, an author set his story in an existing town in the Midwest, and had his characters moving from place to place on the actual streets to be found on maps of the city. Usually, this gives a sense of reality and familiarity. However, readers living in the town wrote to the author informing him that on page seventyfive, his character could not have turned left down Water Street in the period in which the story was set because that street was then one-way and he was going the wrong way. The first example of error (the telephone in the Regency novel) could have been avoided with simple research on the Internet or in a library, or even by reading other novels placed in the Regency Period. In the second example, however, the error might have been avoided by looking up information in archives in that particular city, perhaps official city records or historical collections. Careful authors do extensive research. Many experienced novelists and other fiction writers are aware of archives as sources of information, while newer writers may not be. Since as a rule, fiction writers are not professional researchers, they often have little knowledge of what information is available and where. They might begin with only a general idea of what information they need or if such information is even available. This is due only to a lack of knowledge concerning the existence and usefulness of archives and perhaps a tendency to believe that the Internet and libraries are the best or only sources. Although many facts are easily available from 1. Nancy F. Partner, “Making Up Lost Time: Writing on the Writing of History,” Speculum 61 (1986): 97. 2. Margaret Atwood, “In Search of Alias Grace: On Writing Canadian Historical Fiction,” The American Historical Review 103 (1998): 1504. 2 Journal of Western Archives, Vol. 1 [2010], Iss. 1, Art. 4 http://digitalcommons.usu.edu/westernarchives/vol1/iss1/4 the Internet, more and more authors realize that finding detailed information usually takes more in-depth research. Also, given the amount of existing misinformation, Internet sites should be relied upon only for the basics. As Daniel Boorstin, former librarian of the Library of Congress said of libraries in a 1979 presentation, “we must ... remain places of refuge from the tidal waves of information—and misinformation.” The same is true of archives. One can get a clearer idea of what it was like to be an ordinary person on an ordinary day, in a particular place by reading personal accounts, newspaper reports, or court records. The best resources for details of ordinary life are the many archives located across the country. Whether they are historical archives, congressional archives, or university archives, they hold the information about real people and their lives in times past. Two things are required in order for authors to discover the wealth of information housed in archives of all kinds. First, authors must be made aware of the collections, where they are located, and what information they have for researchers. Second, archivists need to know that there are differences between academic or scholarly research and the information needs of writers of fiction. Generally, archives do not advertise in writing magazines and journals nor even literary journals that are read by authors. Even if fiction writers are aware of the existence and purpose of archives, they may feel that they will not be as welcome as scholarly researchers; certainly not the case in most facilities. The well-documented tendency to be intimidated by librarians is even more of a problem in archives, where authors may never have entered, and access to materials is very different.