This meant I was doing a lot of writing, of diverse sorts. And I quickly noticed that whatever I was writing, it stuck roughly two-thirds of the way down the page. Fiction, nonfiction, it didn’t matter. I could get two-thirds of a page with relatively little trouble and then…nothing.
Now, this happens to everybody. It may be two pages instead of two-thirds of a page, but at some point…you stick. The normal thing to do at this point is get up, go to the bathroom, get a snack, stroll down the street to Starbucks, take the dog for a walk…Often the writer doesn’t come back, and that’s why so many people never finish their books.
I couldn’t afford to do this. My husband had just started his own business, I was temporarily our sole support—and I had to keep writing in order to get paid. So as soon as a grant proposal stuck, I’d just reach for the next software package on my review pile, and when that stuck, I’d switch immediately to the novel scene I was working on—and by the time that one stuck, one of the others would have come loose and I could go back to that one. This round-robin method kept me sitting there and kept me productive.
I still do this, often shuffling two or more scenes from the same book or a novel scene and a piece of a separate novella with some nonfiction bit like a blog or Facebook post—or with some of the omnipresent email.23
Readers who don’t know any writers personally and therefore don’t understand How It Works often tell me (online) to “Stop posting X and get back to writing the next book!”24
The other result of this scattershot mentality is that I don’t work with an outline, and I can’t work in a straight line. I write in bits and pieces, wherever I can see things happening. Little by little, I get more pieces, and gradually these begin to stick together and make larger shapes. It’s kind of like playing Tetris in my head but really slowly.
If you read How-to-Write books, you’ll find all kinds of advice on How to Write (reasonably enough). The important thing to bear in mind is that whatever method is being presented is Not Necessarily True—for you. It’s true for the person who wrote the book, because that’s how his or her mind works. If your mind is wired up in a similar way, then the advice is likely to be helpful, but if it’s not…it’s not. This does not mean you’re doing something wrong. It just means you haven’t yet figured out how your own mind works best. Keep working; you’ll get there.
Now, what were we talking about? Oh, yes…organization.
All of the above notwithstanding—one really does need to be able to find things when you want them. What I do is simple and squalid, but it works:
I write in bits and pieces, and when I begin a piece—which will normally turn into a more-or-less coherent scene eventually—I give the file a name. Now, I began writing Outlander (for practice) in 1988. Is anybody out there old enough to know what DOS stands for?25
Well, the DOS naming conventions say that you can give a file a name up to eight characters long, with a three-character extension (if you want one). Like this: xxxyyyzz.abc.
So I give all my file names for a given book one word that stands for that book—all the main books in the Outlander series are JAMIE, for instance, with a number: JAMIE, JAMIE2, JAMIE3, JAMIE4, etc. (The Scottish Prisoner was PRISON, and The Brotherhood of the Blade BROTHER, and so on.)
This one-word designation is followed by a single symbol that stands for the current year, because I usually require more than one year to write a book (it doesn’t always take more than a year, but I’m usually working on more than one project). I use the symbols on the top line of the keyboard for this—!@#$%^&, etc.—followed by a period.26
And then I give it a two- or three-character extension standing for the date on which I began writing the file.
So, if I were to begin writing a new scene today, for instance, for the ninth book in the Outlander series, the file name would be JAMIE9!.42. This stands for “the ninth book in the main Outlander series, file begun April 2, 2015.”
Now, this is just my own idiosyncratic method of file-naming; the only real requirement is that a file name be unique, and if you’re one of the people who really does get along with a Mac, you no doubt have file names like, “File I Started Writing on April 2, 2015, about why Joanne called her mother a fish-eating cow.”27
The other part of this system—if you can dignify it as such a thing—is the Master File. This is just a document (always called MFILE and stored in the same directory/folder as the other files for a given book) that lists all the file names, with a few keywords next to each one that describe roughly what or who is in that file and sometimes its connection to some other file or files.
The MFILE for Written in My Own Heart’s Blood looks something like this:
JAMIE8`.528—fragment “blood of my blood”—(add to .516)
JAMIE8`.530—Willie and the Whore—follows .521
JAMIE8`.723—Jamie and William—“Are you sorry?”
JAMIE8`.830—Roger and Buck—“Do you know who your father was?”
JAMIE8`.915—Claire and Jamie—“And what did he give you?” (goes w/ .37, .424)
JAMIE8`.O13—Ian/Rachel/William—“Bloody Men”
JAMIE8`.N9—Lord John and Jenny—“How?”
JAMIE8`.N17—Jamie and Claire—goes w/ .424, .516, .525)
JAMIE8`.D26—pulling the Christmas lights from the tree—imagery
JAMIE8!.110—Hal and Willie discuss the title
JAMIE8!.123—fragmentary, good Rachel/William stuff—betray my principles
JAMIE8!.221—Jem in the turbine chamber
I update the MFILE once a week (see “Basic Housekeeping”). And in the fullness of time, as the bits and pieces begin to stick together, I’ll write something that I know goes with something already extant. To find the other piece, I just open the mfile and search for whatever I recall about the piece I’m looking for, like Are you sorry? or blood of my blood—and, bingo, there’s JAMIE8`.723 or JAMIE8`.528.
So that’s it for organization of the writing: file names and a list.
Now, organizing research…a discussion of research really deserves its own separate essay. I have actually taught a weeklong seminar on the art and science of research, but here I’ll just explain briefly how I manage to find the information I’ve already collected, rather than how to go about finding it in the first place. (I warn you, it isn’t going to be very useful.)
Research material is usually either stored on my computer or it’s in a book on my shelves. Bear in mind that the Internet in its present state didn’t exist when I began writing novels. There were no websites, blogs, YouTube videos, etc. There was such a thing as “online,” but aside from government sites like DARPA, what was available to the public lay mostly in the “information services”: GEnie, Delphi, and CompuServe.
I also used America Online, when that became available, but pretty much reverted to CompuServe as being the most useful and enjoyable. I hung around with a CompuServe group called the Literary Forum (Go LitForum, for those old enough to recall28), and after people there found out that I was writing a novel, they would kindly offer me bits and pieces of information that they thought I might find interesting or useful (like the Scottish word “mool,”—meaning grave dirt—or loa-loa worms and the means of removing one from someone’s eye—all good, ripe stuff).
These bits I would store in a directory/folder called JRESRCH (for “Jamie—Research”), and when I needed to know what someone had told me about Quaker Plain Speech, I could just do a quick search through the file names in the folder for Quaker, and there it was.
This is still pretty much what I do, though with the increasing sophistication of computers over the last twenty-five years, I do now also bookmark useful websites and skim through the bookmarks for a site I know I’ve visited.
But overall, the bulk of my research material has always been books. I have perhaps 1,500 books in my core research collection at home (there are currently more than 2,200, including smaller collections here and there), and about half of these
are in the huge built-in bookshelves that my husband gave me as a birthday present some years ago.
These books aren’t filed by author name, color, or size (See “A Brief Footnote on Tidiness”); they’re filed by general subject—my idea of a general subject, that is. From top to bottom of the first bay, for instance, the top three shelves are filled with herbals: books on herbal medicine, the herbology of different cultures and geographical areas, the chemistry of phytoactive substances, with the occasional volume of plant-related folklore or books on growing and using herbs, both historically and presently. Within that category, I make no attempt to organize the books; there are five or six that I find most useful, and those are in the middle of the top shelf. But knowing that anything I want to know about herbs is probably in the upper left corner of the shelves is enough for me to find the book I want.
Other general categories include war and weapons, society and social behavior of England, Scotland, France, or whatever, general stuff on Scotland, stuff about the American Revolution (with the books on specific battles kind of grouped, ditto the books about slavery and the ones with descriptions of army life, but that’s about as far as it goes), and so on.
As I work my way into a book, I’ll find perhaps half a dozen references that are really useful, and these books I’ll actually read all the way through (the others I use for looking things up). As I read (I used to do this while walking on a treadmill, but now I walk outside with dogs, so I mostly do this kind of research reading while my husband is watching true-crime shows on TV), I mark anything that’s sufficiently detailed that I might want to look it up again with a Page Point. These are little metal thingies that slip over the edge of a page, to mark a line or paragraph. They’re neater than stickies, and as I seldom take notes, there’s no need for a writable surface.
Beyond grouping my books, listing my files, and marking a few passages with Page Points, though…I don’t really do anything of an external nature. I don’t take notes, because once I write something down, it’s gone. Not only will I never find the note again, I won’t remember either that it exists or what was in it.
What I’m doing as I read research material is fitting it into the shape(s) of the story. Some of this is very direct—on-the-spot research, as it were—where I’m writing a scene, think that I need to know something, like what kinds of insects live in the Dismal Swamp, and either look it up online or go pull the appropriate book out. I then return to the scene and put in whatever details I just learned.
The background stuff—the order of battle for a particular fight, for instance—I just fit as an approximate mental note into the shape of the book, and later, when I’m actually writing about that battle, will be able to go to the file or book and pull out the necessary information. Though what I do with that information isn’t necessarily straightforward….
For example, I used the Osprey Men-at-Arms book on the Battle of Monmouth as my chief reference for the technical background of that battle (for Written in My Own Heart’s Blood). Having read through the book once, I knew that there was a list of the various divisions and their commanding officers, plus the staff officers present at the battle, in the back of the book, and that there was a series of maps in the body of the book, showing where every division and company was at different points of the daylong fight.
I wouldn’t have known those lists and maps were there had I not read the book, but as I had read it and did know—there was no point in my writing down lists of names, especially as I had no idea where, when, or if I’d use them.
So when I was writing about William’s decision to ignore his orders from General Clinton and go off on his own, I handled the logistics by having an officer bring him a note to take to someone, so that he could pretend that he’d received that note and left before seeing General Clinton’s. Fine. So someone brings him a note—who? A staff officer, but not a high-ranking one; an aide-de-camp, probably. Check list of officers present and pick one of Clinton’s aides-de-camp (he had six at that battle); pick another officer to whom the note should be delivered; check map to be sure that man’s company would be in a useful direction, and if not, go back and pick another one. Voilà!
Or it would have been voilà! if I’d actually done that. As it was, while I was looking at the list of aides-de-camp, it occurred to me to wonder whether Major John André had been at Monmouth. I knew I was going to eventually deal with Benedict Arnold’s betrayal later on—not in this book, but eventually—and it was probably a good idea to mention John André once in a while to keep him in the reader’s mind now and then. (That’s why Claire met him at the Mischianza in Philadelphia toward the end of An Echo in the Bone. I’d read an account of the party and learned that Major André had been not only present but deeply involved in organizing the affair—and that’s why Claire went to the Mischianza in the first place—so I could mention John André.)
As it was, Major André wasn’t on the Osprey book’s list of officers—but I knew he’d been an aide to General Clinton (having read a couple of brief biographies of him)…when did that happen? I checked, and he became Clinton’s aide just after Monmouth—but he was at the time of Monmouth an aide to one of the lesser generals under Clinton and therefore might reasonably have been there, even though he wasn’t listed.29 (Checked quickly through Google, Wikipedia—which has its limits in terms of historical research but is reasonably good for fast date-checking and occasionally turns up interesting bits of trivia—plus several shelf references, found an intriguing account of the establishment of the British Legion—Tarleton’s unit30—and couldn’t find any solid evidence that he’d been somewhere else, so…)
And since my mind was now dealing with the notion of mentioning people who might be useful later on, I thought of Banastre Tarleton; I’d always intended to use him somewhere in the later books, during the Southern Campaign; he was an immensely colorful and somewhat well-known character,31 and he was involved in a small but memorable massacre at Waxhaws, which I might want to use later (if only because no one’s ever heard of it). So…where was he during Monmouth?
He wasn’t on the lists, either—but he might easily have been at the battle. A bit of quick Wikipedia work, plus a flip through The Green Dragoon (a biography of Tarleton; it’s one of the books I’ll eventually read all the way through but haven’t yet), and it was apparent that I could plausibly have him there—and nobody could prove he wasn’t. So…Major André came and asked William to carry a note for him to Colonel Tarleton (with whom William then has a fight over a whore32), and there are Major André and Colonel Tarleton in the story. Neither of them was on the Osprey list of officers—but it was the fact of those lists that made me think of them.
(See, I told you this part wouldn’t be useful.)
My overall attitude to research is that I just collect stuff that may be useful, read the stuff that seems likely to be most useful, and memorize where to find specific information when wanted. Beyond that…I just keep an eye out for the interesting and unexpected. It’s all over the place; you just have to be looking.
Research methods, like writing methods, are very individual. Some writers feel that they have to do a great deal of research before they even think of writing something.33 Other writers (naming no names…) just start writing and do the research on the run, as it were.
When I began writing Outlander, my only intent was to learn how to write a novel—and I chose historical fiction because it seemed the easiest thing to try; I was a research professor (albeit in the sciences) and I knew my way around a library. However (I said to myself), the point was to learn how to write a novel, not to learn everything there was to know about Scotland in the eighteenth century. Therefore (I concluded), I’d go to the university library and start looking at once—but I’d also start writing at once.
After all (I thought), if I wrote something that was later contradicted by the research…I’d just change it. It is, after all, only words on the page—nothing easier.
So th
at’s what I did and have pretty much continued to do. For me, the research and the writing feed off each other in a useful sort of way: I begin a scene, realize that I need to know X, go and look up X, and in the process discover something fascinating about Y (which I would never have thought to look for in the first place), which triggers a completely different scene, which in turn requires information about Z…and so on.
This approach makes perfect sense to some writers and makes others foam at the mouth even to contemplate it. Your mileage may vary.
Now, there are patterns for doing research, and reasonable suggestions (for instance, if you’re doing a quick preliminary overview of a setting or a time period, check the children’s section of the library or Amazon. Children’s books have to be short, clear, and entertaining; thus, they normally have a good, brisk overview, sprinkled with a lot of the kind of picturesque facts that novelists like), but what you find is going to depend a lot on what you’re looking for—and what period you’re working with.
The eighteenth century is a great period to write about, because so much original material from the 1700s still exists. Primary sources abound: diaries, letters, speeches—anything written down by an eyewitness (with a cautionary note about newspapers: eighteenth-century journalists weren’t any more careful, scrupulous, or free of bias than twenty-first-century ones—frequently much less so), and secondary sources (things written after the fact, which are often valuable for their perspective or the collection of facts and opinions) are everywhere. A great many artifacts of the period still exist, too, including buildings, rooms, furniture, clothing, tools, art, etc.
Beyond the accessibility of sources, it’s a great benefit that the original sources are mostly in documents that are still readable by a modern person without special training in ancient languages. There are differences, of course—but the Declaration of Independence, say, or Tom Paine’s “Common Sense,”34 is perfectly comprehensible to a modern person, and so are George Washington’s letters or the writings of Voltaire and Diderot (if one reads French).35
The Companion to the Fiery Cross, a Breath of Snow and Ashes, an Echo in the Bone, and Written in My Own Heart's Blood Page 67