I’ve been looking at an old (2014) copy of the Writers’ & Artists’ Yearbook.
Although many of the listings may be out of date, the book includes numerous articles offering useful advice that remains relevant to this day.
For example, this insight from Bernard Cornwell in a feature called “Notes from a Successful Historical Novelist” stands out:
“The most frequent questions I am asked are about research: how do I do it? How much time do I spend on it? The questions are virtually unanswerable. I assume no one writes historical fiction unless they first love history, and so virtually all of your reading is research. I still read more history for pleasure than any other kind of book. Of course, research has to be focused, but the real danger is doing too much research. If you are writing a novel about Jesuits in the Elizabethan shrubbery then you need to know a lot about the religious settlement, about social life and probably clothes, but do you need to know about Tudor farming practices? Maybe you do, but you will discover that need as you write the book – and a great deal of research is done while the book is being written. To believe that you must equip yourself with an encyclopaedic knowledge of the Tudor world before you begin writing is to guarantee you won’t begin. Get on with it! Tell the story! The gaps in your knowledge will show up soon enough and there will be time to fill them…
“… Then, having done the research, you must reject a great deal of it. There is a terrible impulse to put in everything, just to prove how much you know, but nothing kills a historical novel like long passages written straight from your notebooks.”
This offers food for thought, regardless of the type of fiction you write, as some level of research is always required.
💬 Some questions to ponder:
- Do you enjoy the process of researching? Do you set aside time for it before you start writing?
- How do you share detail with your readers without veering into ‘info-dumping’ territory? (“long passages written straight from your notebook”)
- Have you ever encountered a point where you realised you needed more research while writing your story? How did you handle that?
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