How Important is Research in a Novel? by Brad Taylor

Ask twenty different authors what they think about the relative importance of research for a novel, and you’ll get twenty different opinions. On one side of the scale, some will say it’s irrelevant and that people read for good writing, not good research, and that water-tight fact-finding will never overcome bad prose.

I’m on the other side of the scale. Yes, the writing comes first, but nailing the details only adds to the effect. There is no downside. Not bothering to conduct rudimentary research into the subject matter, in my mind, is insulting to the reader. It smacks of laziness, especially if the reader has some grasp of the subject. In fact, as a reader myself I can only get so far in a book if the information blatantly conflicts with the facts that I know. I’m not asking anyone to be an expert, but at least show me you can find Wikipedia. Or buy a Guns and Ammo magazine. I’ll forgive almost anything if the author shows me he tried.

Because of this, I’m rabid about research. The knowledge base I gained from my previous career is absolutely essential as a starting point, but I don’t have an encyclopedic memory. Suffice it to say, I have to do an enormous amount of fact checking, from something as minute as how long a certain flight would take and the time-zones involved to whether a particular weapon fires from the open-bolt position. Invariably, whenever I try to wing it based on my memory and experiences alone, I find out I’m wrong. I’ve learned to fact-check just about everything. Luckily, if I can’t find the answer on my own, odds are very good that I know someone who can.

There is a trap with this, and I’ve fallen into it more times than I can count, and that is you want to show off the research you’ve done, babbling on about interesting but irrelevant tidbits, with the plot suffering as a result. I’ve just come to understand that out of all the research I do, only about two percent will make it into the book. Especially when talking about locations.

I’m a little bit of a perfectionist when it comes to real-world settings, and I research them relentlessly. I’ve traveled all over the world, which is a good thing when I want to describe a setting, but make no mistake; I have to really study locations to get them right. For example, I’ve been to both Central and South America, but I have never been to Guatemala or Belize, major settings in One Rough Man. I had to research both forever, and ultimately didn’t use 99% of what I found. In the end I’m sure that someone who’s actually spent some time there will find flaws in my descriptions. I’m okay with that, because I gave it my best shot.

When I have the ability to do first-hand research, I do so. The Atlanta airport scene is a pretty good example of that. Basically, Jennifer and Pike get stopped at customs and have to break out of the secondary interrogation facility. I tried to write how they would evade capture, and escape what’s become one of the most secure areas since 9/11, using my own recollection of the airport. When I was done, I realized that I really didn’t know enough about the security of the airport, and that the way I had written it was a little hokey. I have been through that airport probably 500 times, but I’d never looked at the security from an evasion standpoint. One thing I was convinced of, though, was they weren’t going to escape by using normal passenger corridors. I called up some pilot friends of mine and proposed a simple question: how can I get out of the Atlanta airport without going the usual passenger route? They gave me the breakdown of what crew members do, to include locations of employee lounges and employee bus routes. From there, I simply flew to the airport and retraced Pike and Jennifer’s steps from customs, noting the security in place such as cameras, alarms, and checkpoints. After casing the place it was pretty easy to figure out how they could do it.

Since I’m not independently wealthy, I couldn’t afford to do what I did with the Atlanta scene for the scenes in Bosnia, Oslo, or Guatemala. In those cases, I had to rely on the internet, my memory and friends with specialized knowledge. There’s a military phrase called Open Source Intelligence, which basically means, “read the paper and see what you can find out”. In today’s times, that means the internet, and it’s amazing what’s out there, from airport databases and flikr, to Google Earth and 360cities. Surprisingly, my favorite source is a blog from backpacking college students. Those folks go everywhere, and talk about everything from security at border crossings to the best way to get a taxi, complete with pictures. Suffice to say, just about anything can be found if one looks hard enough.

For instance, I’ve been inside the White House situation room – once – but I’m certainly not well versed on the White House floor plan, something I needed to be if Kurt was going to keep seeing the president. Obviously, getting in and stomping around the president’s personal space was problematic. Luckily, there’s an entire website dedicated to the history of the White House, complete with the floor plan through the years and photos.

I try to do that with any scene I write, but I’ll be honest, if I need something, I’ll create it. For instance, the Four Courts pub where Pike is ambushed is a real location in Clarendon, Virginia. The streets around it are accurate, as are the Metro stops to get there. I cased that area as well, trying to figure out how I would ambush Pike (and get a Guinness at the pub). I planned the ambush realistically, but added an alley to the left of the pub. It doesn’t exist in real life, but it does in my book. I know that sounds hypocritical, but I did this because in the end the writing does come first. The alley was critical to the story.

I’ll fake things for reasons other than the story as well. Writers without my background can guess how widget X works, and if they get it right everyone wonders how they got the information. My problem is the opposite: I do know how things work, and most of that knowledge is classified, so I have to spend a lot of time tempering what I know when I write, even if it seems mundane. For instance, I’m currently working on a scene for book two where terrorists attack an Army Ammunition Supply Point. I traveled to and studied the ASP, then simply wrote how I would hit it to get to the ammunition inside. After I was done, I read it and thought, “What the hell are you doing? You’ve just written a blueprint on how to attack a U.S. Federal facility!” My insider knowledge, coupled with my tactical skill set, had made it too real. I had to go back and throw in some red herrings. I know I’ll get dinged on that by someone with the same knowledge as me, saying, “That would never work,” but that’s the point.

In the end, I fall on the “research” bandwagon, although I realize there’s no way I’m going to be perfect. Mistakes will happen, no matter how much research I do, and I want to kick myself when that occurs, but it’s just the way of writing. Pike steals a Chevy Cutlass in Guatemala City to escape, and after all of the research on the city itself, I’m told by an advanced copy reader – after I’d blessed the final manuscript – that Chevrolet didn’t make the Cutlass. Oldsmobile did.

Mistakes like that don’t make me throw my hands up at the futility of it all, because I owe it to the reader. My cut-line on real versus make-believe is the story itself. If you make something up for the purposes of the plot, knowing it’s wrong, and it makes the story stronger, then you’ve enhanced the enjoyment of the reader. On the other hand, using the story as an excuse for a lack of research is really just a shortcut – and the reader will know it. Maybe not all readers will care, but even if only one does, you’ve failed.

Brad Taylor, Lieutenant Colonel (ret.), is a twenty-one-year veteran of the U.S. Army Infantry and Special Forces, including eight years with the 1st Special Forces Operational Detachment-Delta, popularly known as Delta Force. He retired in 2010 and now lives in Charleston, SC with his wife and two daughters. For more information visit him online at http://www.bradtaylorbooks.com.

Carla Buckley Chats About Her New Release and Fab Contest

Chevy Stevens is the NYT Bestselling debut author of Still Missing (St. Martins, 2010). Recently she sat down and had a chat with Carla Buckley, debut author of The Things That Keep Us Here (Random House, 2010) about the forthcoming release of Carla’s critically-acclaimed book in trade paperback.

Chevy: The Things That Keep Us Here is about a family trying to survive a terrible pandemic and although there are lots of fascinating scientific facts—some which are still keeping me up at night—the book never inundated us with boring data. Personally, I hate it when an author dumps a bunch of information in the middle of a book, but I know how hard it can be to resist sharing all your newfound research. How did you avoid that?

Carla: Thanks, Chevy. That's so nice of you to say! I did a lot of research-- from reading about the 1918 Great Pandemic to interviewing scientists out in the

field monitoring the migratory bird population.

There's nothing better than talking to people who are passionate about their work. They'll put things in such interesting and conversational ways that even I--a former art major--can follow along.

I didn't want to burden my story with a lot of scientific facts, but I did want to convey just how scary the flu virus is. One way I did this was to have Peter, the husband in my story, deliver a lecture to a group of students who knew nothing about influenza. Another way was to have Ann, Peter's wife and a non-scientist, take the lead so that she could ask the questions that mattered, as the threat unfolded.

Chevy: Reading about the 1918 Great Pandemic, eh? Fun! All kidding aside, another thing I realized after I finished reading the book

(when I wasn’t busy stockpiling my house with supplies and trying to convince my husband to build a bunker in the backyard), is that although science supports the story line, it’s really more focused on this one family as they try to survive a pandemic—a family that was already struggling. What made you decide to go in that direction?

Carla: Actually, some of those books on the Great Pandemic are really terrifying! Back then, people didn't have a clue what was making them sick. They could only watch in horror as it worked its way through their neighborhoods and homes.

Some of that helplessness played out in my decision to write about a pandemic from the perspective of one average American family. I wanted to put real people in a situation that tested them and forced them to face their greatest fears, and by doing so, show how people can be pulled apart or brought together under the worst possible circumstances.

Chevy: Well, it was very effective. One of the reasons I couldn’t put your book down was because I became so emotionally involved with the characters. Another reason was that the pandemic you described was an all too real possibility. This was something that could happen, and in fact, did. I also read recently that birds have been falling from the sky. What was it like for you when your nightmares came true?

Carla: Um...not good! I can't tell you how many readers have contacted me regarding the recent bird die-offs, wondering if my story was about to come true. I asked my scientist husband what the scientific community was saying, and his response was that scientists were as perplexed as the rest of us. Yikes!

The good news (though not for the birds) was that those recent deaths were not due to disease.

But the recent H1N1 Pandemic was another story. It started off exactly as the 1918 Pandemic had, with a mild, quiet surfacing in the spring followed by a large and much more active rebound in the fall. All my research had shown that this could be the pandemic the world had long been dreading. Smack in the middle of all this, I had my first book appearance scheduled 400 miles away. I decided to board the plane, but I made my husband promise that if the airports shut down and borders were closed, he'd hunker down with the kids and I'd figure out a way to get back home. Very fortunately (not to diminish the tragedy of the lives that were lost) the H1N1 strain proved not to have a high mortality rate and now there is a vaccine against it.

Chevy: That must have been terrifying! Now that the world is relatively safe for the moment, let’s talk about something that’s essential to a writer’s survival. Snacks! As an author myself, I know that those long days at the keyboard can be really frustrating, how you want to tear your hair out rewriting the same scene over and over, and the only things that get me through are popcorn and peanut butter—not at the same time! What are some of your favorite food-related-stress-reliefs?

Carla: Excuse me while I brush the crumbs out of my keyboard. There. Let's see. *studies heap of crumbs on desktop* Well, it seems that this week, I nibbled on leftover Chinese food, Raisinets, brownies, and potato chips. Yep, that seems to be everything. Don't tell my kids what I eat while they're at school. I'm trying to convince them to eat more fruits and vegetables.

Chevy: You are a writer after my own heart, Carla—but now I’m hungry! After we wrap up this interview I’m going to have to hit the store ASAP. I know you have an exciting contest you want to tell us about, but before we learn how readers can win a copy of your book, I wanted to ask about your next novel Invisible. One of the truly frightening aspects of The Things That Keep Us Here was the idea of the threat being this big nameless thing spreading across the world, something we couldn’t see or put a face to, but that was coming for you and your family. Does your next book have any similar elements?

Carla: I wish I could run to the store with you! We could pile a shopping cart with salty and sweet things, and then watch some reality TV while we plot our next books. Speaking of which, yes, I also wanted my next novel to be about a family in turmoil forced to face a much larger crisis. Invisible tells the story about a woman who returns to her small hometown after a long absence to attend her sister's funeral. While she's there, she not only confronts her own tragic past but what might have what sickened her sister and her former neighbors and friends. I didn't want to be a disease-of-the-week writer, however, so I did a lot of research before unearthing a different sort of a scientific threat that's bearing down on humankind and which I predict it will be making headlines soon.

Chevy: Oh! That sounds like bliss! The running to the store part, not the plot

for Invisible—that sounds terrifying. Then again, the two of us loose in a junk food aisle could also be terrifying. So, now that you've thoroughly scared the crap out of us and I'm fighting the urge to barricade myself into my house, why don't you tell us about your contest?

Carla: No, don't barricade yourself--at least, not until I get there, armed with junk food! Okay, this is how the contest will run:

Everyone who leaves a comment about their favorite survival tip on my Facebook Fan Page by Monday, January 31 (12 pm EST) will be entered into a contest to win a signed copy of The Things That Keep Us Here along with my own concept of a survival kit.

Post a comment here on The Thrill Begins blog AND on my fan page and be entered twice. Tweet or FB the link to the contest (and let me know by posting it to my fan page) and be entered three times!

Chevy: That sounds great! I can't wait to read everyone's answers. Now please hand over--I mean pass--the chocolate.

To find out more about Chevy and Carla, check out their websites: http://www.ChevyStevens.com and http://www.CarlaBuckley.com