Maxim Monday #7: Do the Research (Without Letting It Do You)

Glen battles the blather. Then offers some.

It’s pledge drive week at my local public radio station. Which reminds me:

If you find yourself checking back here with any frequency…and if you’re finding value or use in these posts…I would so much appreciate your subscription. Paid if you can afford it, free if you can’t. Paid gets you the chance to suggest future posts, comment, interact. It gets you entry into the monthly giveaways I am currently running. Most of all, it encourages me to keep going. Makes me think all the work I am pouring into these posts might be of value.

Thanks very much.

Now, then. This week’s Maxim Monday is below the photo. If this is your first time here, you might want to click back to Maxim Monday #1 for an introductory user’s guide.

The primary inspiration for The Book of Bunk, my 2010 alternate history/fairy tale about the Federal Writers’ Project during the Great Depression, was not my enduring fascination for that period (although I had and still have that). It was actually my father’s experiences with the San Diego Port Authority, which had tasked him with heading a committee to select new public art for some of the city’s parks.

Being my fearless dad— artist, art lover, enthusiast, truster in other people’s open-mindedness despite lifelong experience that should have taught him otherwise— he set about luring submissions from some of the iconic contemporary artists of the day. Some of what he got was poetic, magical, astonishing (I still dream sometimes about Vito Acconci’s proposal for plane shadow-shapes cut into the grass in the open spaces around the harbor near the airport; this was way before 9/11, remember, when plane shadows meant something very different than they do now).

Once he submitted the proposals, what my dad received in return was hate mail. Boxes of it. Headlines in the city paper— or a featured letter? I don’t remember, and you’ll cleverly note that I am not going back to research which right now—such as “Hirshberg, Ellsworth Kelly Give San Diego the Shaft!” Plus a couple we-know-where-you-live threats of violence.

Years afterward, I found myself circling back to that time. Swirling it together with the ongoing, vitriolic response of so many American citizens and members of Congress to the National Endowment for the Arts. And also with a memory of something I’d read somewhere, about writers being almost the last group to receive any support from the Works Progress Administration in the 1930s, and the support they did eventually get coming with a mandate that they not do anything so superfluous as writing fiction.

What is it, I wondered, that has so consistently made Americans not just dubious about or disinterested in but actively hostile toward American artists? Why have even I always been instinctively leery about asking for public support for making my own art?

Ooh, I know, I thought. I’mma write a novel about that.

(Because…that’ll show ‘em? Because I’d always sworn I had no interest whatsoever in writing fiction about fiction writing? Because what could be more writer-ish than rejecting my own precepts?!)

The above conversation with myself took place in 1997. Those of you who took and passed Advanced Writer Math already will have worked out that writing The Book of Bunk, therefore, took me thirteen years.

Thirteen years.

It was the research’s fault.

If I was going to write about the 1930s, I wanted to do it right. Which I took to mean accurately. So I asked for stories from everyone I knew who’d been there. Got some astonishing anecdotes and a couple lines too beautiful and perfect even to use. One of those came from my Montana grad school professor and friend Earl Ganz, who told me, “It was just so perfectly named. That’s exactly how it felt. Like a crushing national malaise.”

Then I dug up and started reading as many of the WPA Guides to the States— in effect vacation guides for road trips almost no one could afford to take, many of them documenting corners of the country already being erased as other WPA projects built the bridges and highways that connected cities to each other and accidentally obliterated a whole way of life in the process—as I could find. They are astonishing books. You should read them. They were what the writers were tasked with; what the government thought just might be worth paying writers a sort of living for. They are full of storytelling, regional flavor, playful asides, sneaky hidden jokes or political diatribes, wild observations. Very few of the writers who worked on them ever talked about them, and those who did seemed embarrassed.

I had so much fun reading those books that I kept forgetting I was trying to write my own, which was in essence a portrait of a bunch of WPA writers inventing an imaginary county to slip into the North Carolina guide that no one would ever be able to find. Worse, I kept getting bogged down trying to fit in all the amazing things I’d learned and read.

I spent even more time with the WPA slave narratives and oral histories, as well as every other primary source I could find about Black community life in the 1930s Carolinas, because I knew that that was going to play a significant role in the story I wanted to tell, and I desperately didn’t want to get that wrong.

In other words, I set out to do research for all the reasons research really is important: to gain insight, and because I was fascinated, and because I wanted not to make any mistakes.

And as a result— though it took me literally a decade of false starts to understand what was happening— I wound up ignoring my own original ideas in favor of paraphrasing or summarizing memories from people who’d been there.

And also convincing myself that devoting just a couple more months to devouring just a few more of the Guides to the States was me writing, because surely I needed more astonishing tidbits and anecdotes to sprinkle into my own (unwritten, not formed) narrative.

And also feeling paralyzed— scared to death, honestly— of in any way trivializing or misrepresenting the Black experiences and simmering racial tensions…well, I was about to type ‘of the time’, but maybe I’ll just let that thought end at ‘tensions’.

I don’t know what finally gave me the idea— desperation, probably— but one day in 2007, I moved all my Writers’ Guides off my desk onto the shelves. Then I lifted all the amazing documents (and they truly were amazing; I mean, my folklorist wife somehow dug up a working draft of the original field instructions issued to the writers on the project) away from my workspace and put them in a box.

Then I dumped every single file with a false start of my book into one folder, which has never been opened since. I opened a new, blank document on my computer. And I started telling my story. This time, I finished it.

So am I telling you now that you should not research?

Of course you should research. Because you need perspectives other than your own, and because learning things is almost as much fun as using what you’ve learned, and because yes, damn right, and more than ever, if you’re going to be bold enough to tell a story not entirely your own— meaning, tell a story, period, because there is no such thing as a story entirely your own— you owe it to the people you’re depicting to try to capture their worlds and experiences as accurately as you can.

But then you should put all that aside, somewhere where you can reach it when you need it, and start writing your story. Knowing, for sure, that you’re going to get things wrong. That if your story gets out to people, you’re probably going to get a note from someone telling you about something you missed or didn’t understand, and you’re going to regret that, and it will hurt.

But sometimes, especially right now, I really do feel like we’ve all forgotten what fiction is, and what it’s for. It’s not the most precise and accurate depiction even of yourself or your own culture or memories, let alone everyone’s; it’s a funhouse mirror. A way of tilting human experience that hopefully gives us all new lenses for viewing experience, and sharing it, and discovering new terrors and meaning and possibilities for connection in it.

In the end, the thing you most have to get “right” when writing fiction is the story you’re telling. If, in real life, that park where you’re setting a scene is across the actual city from where you need it to be…then move the park. Give it a new name, maybe, but move it. If a character wouldn’t quite have behaved at the time you’re discussing in the way you’re imagining, come up with a set of circumstances that make that behavior seem possible.And then fully explore and imagine the consequences.

If all this sounds contradictory…I mean, have you read the rest of these posts? But the contradictions don’t belabor either side of the argument, to me. You owe it to your project, and to your peace of mind, and to any communities or people you’re going to have the temerity to write stories about, to do the research. More than that, you’re going to want to.

And then you owe it to yourself, your art, and your readers, to put all that aside and write what you’ve got.

Unless you’re creating historical fiction in the strictest sense (and maybe even then), your obligation as a fiction writer is to make the fiction true. Meaning true to itself. Because that’s what will make it significant for the very real people who hopefully will read and find meaning in it.