So it’s legitimate—and desirable—to include detail for the purpose of drawing an unfamiliar milieu, and for the entertainment of the reader. How one includes masses of detail without bogging the reader down in wads of stuff that sound like you cribbed it from the Encyclopaedia Britannica is a good question of technique, but the first problem is simply to find the stuff.
I mentioned Basic Skills and General Principles in doing research. Basic Skills include: one, knowing how to use a library, and two, how to skim a book for information. General Principles include: one, getting an overview, two, locating specifics, and three, organizing stuff.
BASIC SKILLS
How to Use a Library
Actually, if you don’t already have a good notion how to use a library, I strongly recommend that you don’t write historical novels. However, beyond a simple familiarity with the card catalog and the nuances of the Library of Congress system, there are a couple of possibly useful things to know.
For really detailed historical research, you will need a large university or college library. Public libraries simply don’t stock the sorts of references needed for good research on most periods—for the excellent reasons that most such references are a) fairly old, and b) not what most people want to read for recreation. Public libraries stock books for reading; university libraries stock books for looking up esoteric information.
When I began doing research for my first novel, I was a university professor, and fortunately had a large library available; not everyone is so lucky. Still, if you do live within driving distance of a college or university, go to the library and ask about getting a community borrower’s card. Most such libraries have these; for a small annual fee, you can have at least limited borrowing privileges (and if you’re a writer, the fee is tax-deductible as a business expense).
If you don’t live near a good library, it will be a lot harder to do effective research, but luckily these days no one is completely out of touch. Many large collections are accessible online, at least in terms of finding what’s available. Getting your hands on a book is another matter, but books can be ordered, or arrangements can be made to borrow material, even at a distance.
Virtually all large libraries have a system called interlibrary loan. This means that if you require, say, a book on Irish costume in the sixteenth century, and have discovered that your local university library doesn’t have anything of this nature—but the Boston College library does—you can file a request with your local library for the book, and your library will borrow it from Boston College for you.
This is a wonderful assistance to a researcher; the only real drawback to interlibrary loan is that it’s often rather slow, and may take weeks or even months to retrieve a particular volume and get it to your library.
Card Catalog
Most collections these days have been catalogued electronically. This is fast, efficient, and generally a Good Thing. At the same time, the transfer of information from real cards to an electronic version is not always complete; in the interests of efficiency, older volumes that don’t circulate much may not be recorded in the new catalog, or may be put aside for later addition.
The hard copy version of the card catalog also sometimes contains information that isn’t included in the new electronic version—handwritten notations by librarians as to book location, related titles, and so on. There isn’t much you can do about this, but if your library still has the hard copy card catalog, it’s worth consulting that, in addition to the electronic version. Also ask the reference librarian whether your library’s collection has been completely converted to electronic form, in case some older parts of the collection have not.
The idiosyncrasy of method that I mentioned earlier begins with the first steps of a search—what you type into an electronic card catalog (or a Web search engine). Even here, though, there are General Principles: one, cast your net widely at first, and two, look for call-number patterns.
That is, if you are interested in a specific time-period and a particular place, you would naturally type something like SCOTLAND HIGHLANDS EIGHTEENTH CENTURY as your search parameters. This will give you those titles most closely approximating what you think you’re looking for.
However, it’s also worthwhile doing another search, simply on SCOTLAND, since you may well find a number of useful books—on geography, history, customs, language, etc.—that don’t have the keywords HIGHLANDS or EIGHTEENTH CENTURY associated with them.
Casting a wide net, of course, will give you a huge list of titles (this being the point of doing the limited search first; you can be starting with the most relevant books while looking farther afield). Look through the titles, marking down those that seem as though they might be useful or interesting. Then look at these books, to see whether there are patterns of shared call numbers. That is, do most of the books you’ve picked out have call numbers beginning “QC 357” or “DA 785”?
Online Research
OWING TO ONE THING and another, I seem to have developed an odd reputation as a writer whose career is inextricably intertwined with the Internet. Consequently, many people assume that I must naturally be doing all of my research online, through Web-surfing.
Frankly, while the Internet is a valuable tool for locating people and resources, I can’t imagine doing serious historical research using the Web as a primary source. The depth of information and breadth of detail that one needs just doesn’t exist on most Web pages, and the process of searching is much more tedious and time-consuming than is browsing in a good library—with less chance of success.
This is not to say that one can’t find very interesting bits and pieces on the Web—and services such as amazon.com and ukbooks.com are invaluable for locating and delivering books conveniently. Likewise, Web-searching can lead you through the holdings of large university libraries and help you find where to go—but Web-surfing is only an adjunct to sound library research, not a replacement for it.
However, one mustn’t overlook other aspects of online research; beyond the existence of Web sites, one can locate remarkably helpful people with expertise in various fields, through the large subscription services (like AOL and CompuServe) and various newsgroups.
If so, stop writing down specific titles (which is a big pain), and simply write down the common call-number prefix. Go to the stack(s) where that call number is located, and browse in person. You will invariably find a number of books that are related in topic to what you were searching for, but which didn’t appear in the card catalog search because they weren’t entered with the specific key words under which you were searching. (As a small example: Drums of Autumn would not come up under a search for NORTH CAROLINA, in spite of the fact that the book is set there, because the person who catalogued it for the Library of Congress evidently didn’t read more than the first chapter. Since the first chapter is set in Charleston, the book is catalogued under SOUTH CAROLINA, even though the book itself has nothing to do with that state.)
Another benefit to shelf-browsing is that it enables you to look directly at the book, rather than judging on the basis of title alone whether this is something you need or not. If you’re not sure, check the table of contents and the index; that should tell you within seconds whether this book has any information that might be of use to you.
How to Read a Book for Information
Writers occasionally come up to me at conferences and say things like, “Oh, I’d love to do a historical novel. But I just can’t bear the thought of all that reeeeeeeseeeeearch.” “Research” is always pronounced in a dismal whining tone, when used in this context.)
I suspect that such persons are under the delusion that “reeeeeseeeearch” involves reading every single word of hundreds of terribly boring books, while taking copious notes on eye-glazing topics from “annealing processes used in the early Bronze Age” to “zoofauna of the digestive tract of the Western hoopoe,” meanwhile juggling billions of index cards with one hand tied behind one’s back.
Say you scan the card catalog and turn up a book that sounds as though it might be useful to you. When you get your hands on the book, look at it. A glance at the first page is usually enough to tell you whether you’ve got a book written for the edification of the general public, or somebody’s dissertation.
What you do then is: one, check the table of contents (if it has one); two, check the Index (if it has one); and three, flip hither and yon and browse a few pages. This will tell you what level of detail this book contains, and the scope of the subject matter covered. If it looks hideously boring, close the book and pick up another one. If you think a given library book might contain useful information, take it. Taking it out of the library does not oblige you to read it from cover to cover.
What you are doing here is simply discovering what kind of information each book contains. A lot of books may be superficially related to your topic, but not really useful—take them back to the library. Some will be perfect for your purpose—put these aside to be carefully read. Some will have useful information, but not look interesting enough to read: Put these aside to look things up in.
If you know that you will be dealing with a particular battle or political setting, then it makes sense to read detailed accounts of that particular event or setting. But if you need to know what kind of underwear women wore? Nah. You get a good book on costume, but you don’t necessary read the whole thing, cover to cover. You look up “underwear” in the index, find out what you need to know—and put the book back on the shelf until you need to know what sort of boots a gentleman would wear for riding.
The odd thing about doing any kind of library research—whether for scientific or literary purposes—is that once you begin searching, things start finding you. One thing leads to another; a bibliographic citation in a not-very-relevant paper will lead you to exactly the source you need; browsing in a general section of the library causes books to leap off the shelf at you.
(On one such browsing expedition, I happened to take a very heavy book from the shelf. I sat down on the floor to thumb through it, and when I glanced up from the table of contents—which had nothing very entertaining—what should I see, directly in front of my nose, but a book titled Muster Roll of Charles Edward Stuart’s Army. That’s just what it was, too; a list of all the men known to have fought with the Highland Army in the Rising of 1745. I found this book well after I had written Voyager, but out of curiosity, pulled it out and looked up the Master of Lovat’s regiment, which—like all the others—listed the officers first. It made the hair rise up on the back of my neck to see LIEUTENANT COLONEL: JAMES FRASER listed— though it rose still more when I turned the page and found Duncan McDonald and Giles McMartin on the next page (see beginning of Voyager, and the names of the men who were executed by the English after Culloden).
GENERAL PRINCIPLES OF DOING RESEARCH
Once you’ve dug yourself into the library and found a few promising sections of the stacks to mine, how do you proceed? In any way that makes sense to you, really—but in general, you might consider…
Overview
First, what do you need to know, in order to start writing? (You don’t have to figure this all out ahead of time—you may not know what you need to know, until you’ve been working for a while.) Some writers choose a particular period because they are drawn to it and already know quite a lot about it. Plainly their priorities will be different from those of someone who doesn’t know one damn thing about the time or place—like me. I began with total ignorance both of Scotland and the eighteenth century. All I knew was that at some point, men wore kilts—which was at the time a sufficient reason for choosing that period.
One danger of the “I must know everything before I begin” attitude is that it’s impossible to know everything—and the feeling that one has to know everything before writing is a nifty way of avoiding writing altogether.
As I mentioned above, a disinclination to do the often arduous, and always time-consuming work of research is a major drawback to writing historical novels. If you don’t have at least a minor passion for research, you will find the work very difficult.
However, many historical novelists have the opposite problem. They enjoy the research so much that they never get around to actually writing the book. One question that I hear a lot at writers conferences is “How do you know when you’ve done enough research, and are ready to write?”
Well… you don’t. Or rather, I don’t. There’s always more that could be found out, after all.
Idiosyncrasy and personal preference enter the picture here; some writers feel that they must know almost everything about a time period before they begin writing; others, not so much. Personally, I began doing the writing and the research concurrently, and finding that satisfactory, have kept on doing it that way.
One good, quick way of getting an overview of a time period or geographical location is to check the kids’ section of the library. Kids’ books are a) usually short, b) always readable, c) present the most salient facts in a condensed space, and d) tend to include the “fun” (i.e., interesting) details of a subject—which are, not incidentally, the sort of details that most appeal to novelists.
Beyond the children’s section, look for popular accounts.1 These overview books are ones that you probably do want to read all the way through (though skimming is perfectly all right; as long as you know what sort of information is in this book, you can always go back later and look up things in more detail). So it’s worth choosing texts that are reasonably entertaining.
Take note of more particular or esoteric texts, but as a general principle, put these aside for later reference, when you have a better idea as to what you really need.
Locating Specifics
Sometimes you will know that you require a great deal of specific information on one or more particular areas of interest. For example, once having cast Claire Randall as a healer, I knew I was going to require quite a lot of information on herbs and botanical medicine—because that was the only effective medical therapy available in the eighteenth century.
Consequently, I began collecting “herbals”—guides to herbs and their uses. I now have some thirty-odd herbals, ranging from Chinese herbal medicine to Native American herbology and beyond (see “Don’t Try This at Home”). Have I read all these books? Not on your tintype. I have, however, looked at them enough to know when to consult The Peterson Field Guide to Medicinal Plants (published in the 1980s) and when to look at Culpeper’s Complete Herbal (published in the seventeenth century).
That’s why such books are called “reference” books; they aren’t intended to be read word for word; they’re intended to supply specific information easily and quickly.
Luckily, reference books exist on a huge number of topics. Look in the bibliographies of your “overview” books for more specialized references. Browse the relevant sections of libraries and bookstores; always thumb through the stacks on remainder tables.
Another good source of regional or historical references—many of them quite specialized, and not easily available elsewhere—are the bookshops attached to museums and national parks. Particularly in the United States, National Park Service bookshops often stock immensely helpful references on the plant and animal life of the region, plus historical accounts published by local researchers (which may not be available through regular book outlets).
If you’re not in a position to visit such places personally, try telephoning; the staffers are often very helpful, and some shops may even have lists or catalogs of available materials which they can send you.
Finally, a useful source of esoteric historical information is the
Dover catalog. Dover is a publishing company specializing in reprints of material in the public domain, and they often have inexpensive facsimile reprints of very old material (one of the references on my shelf at the moment is a facsimile reprint of Baron von Steuben’s Revolutionary War Drill Manual, 1794 edition—which I found in the bookshop at the Saratoga Battlefield National Park).
Sometimes you find Dover reprints in regular bookstores—particularly the coloring books, which are really excellent (and entertaining) reference material. I have a coloring book on “Colonial Trades,” for example, that illustrates all the common objects to be found in the shops of a cobbler, wainwright, tinsmith, silversmith, etc., and another on “Uniforms of the Revolution.” But the more obscure materials are usually available only through specialty shops or by catalog order.2
Organizing Stuff
Once you are well embarked on your research, the problem arises of organizing and keeping track of it all. Now, here I am afraid you are talking to the wrong person. People often ask me how I organize all the voluminous research required for one of these monstrous books—to which the answer is, “Well, see those three bookcases over there? Most of the stuff I use is in them.”3
The horrid truth is that I don’t organize things, beyond putting all the herbals on one shelf and all the books about magic on another. I don’t normally write down anything except the actual text of the novel I’m working on.
I mentioned earlier that there are differences between doing scientific research and novelistic research, and organization of material is one of them—at least for me. When I did scientific research, I kept index card files, and (later) databases of references, because when you write scientific papers, you have to be prepared to back up every single factual assertion with either a) a citation of someone else’s work or b) your own data.
The Outlandish Companion Page 36