Cultivating Curiosity: Research in Fiction Writing

by Mandira Pattnaik

Florian Olivo

Currently fascinated about Japanese culture after watching a series of travel videos, I have been reading up about food (onigiri, udon, yakitori) beyond the more popular sushi and tempura, places (Nara, Asakusa) beyond the usual Mt. Fuji and Shibuya, and about festivals like the Gion and Tenjin Matsuri beyond the Cherry Blossom and Snow Festivals. I laugh at myself for the depths that I go, and feel happy when I use bits from the info I have gathered in my short fiction.

But longer fiction is a different game. When people tell me they are ‘researching’ for their novel, I assume they are taking field trips alongside researches and scientists (like novelist C J Hauser, to study the whooping crane on the gulf coast of Texas and wrote a remarkable essay about it), or going undercover in a media house unearthing sensitive information, or caging themselves in a ten-by-six feet room to understand how a prison sentence feels. From a distance, this seems like a daunting task, but it also seems to be fairly common. Amitav Ghosh talks about his visit to Myanmar for The Glass Palace and to “Mauritius, to look at the National Archives and some other libraries; I spent some time in Greenwich, England, looking at the magnificent collection of the National Maritime Museum…” for Sea of Poppies. Another author from the Indian subcontinent, Shehan Karunatilaka who won the 2022 Booker Prize for his novel The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, says: “I do a lot of research for my books. I spend a third of the time [spent producing a book], maybe a year, on research…For The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida I read about 1989, about different political factions and unsolved murders. I had a vague memory of it myself. All the ghosts in the story are based on real unsolved murder cases. I watched horror films. I read ghost stories, religious texts, philosophy, near-death experiences.” I find it interesting how these works of fiction were undoubtedly leaps of imagination but gloriously supported by heavy pillars of things that had happened and were verifiable truths. It follows that writers routinely supplement their imagination with research, and the better a story-teller is, the more inseparable is the result.

Extending on this reality, research seems to be a valid substitute to what imagination and experience cannot produce. It may appear, therefore, that some part of fiction writing is science because it is definitely more organized than what classifying it as art would make us think. I understand that such a declaration would be going too far. Obviously, writing is not based on a formula; one cannot straightjacket a creative piece bound by a set of principles or rules. But whether or not it is more science than art (or more art than science) perhaps depends on the ‘level of research’ incorporated into the work through the tools of ‘craft’ in the hands of the creator. Were the writer striving to give out too much information or too many points based on facts, then the work itself might veer towards a piece of lecture that is unable to build a emotional connection with the readers. Conversely, if the writer uses too much imagination and doesn’t care for facts, the work may cease to be literary fiction and be more like a fantasy tale, where people fly and there’s a rainforest in Antarctica. Evidently, seasoned writers manage to arrive at a balance. Scientifically speaking, for a work to be considered serious, the writer must identify what the core of the subject matter is, and then research the concerned field to supplement previous knowledge and experience. The application of that gathered and filtered research probably depends on what is important against what is not, in the context of the draft. For example, in case of a minor plot point, one may cut corners to cement a plot hole where the concerned reality does not fit, but might need to tweak the entire narrative course when the real world truth, discovered by research, is very different from what the writer ‘thought to be true’ and envisaged accordingly. Significantly, more research is indeed needed if one is writing about medical processes, archaeological or historical facts, and truths about iconic figures and popular men and women — these are seldom yielding to fictional tampering.

Of course, there’s also the point to consider that certain genres demand way more research than others, even in the scope of fiction writing. For example, if one of your characters is a tenth century Indian prince, you’ll need to have your facts right about what he used, how he dressed, and what language he spoke. Similarly, for a fictional film like Gravity (2013), the basic premise was drawn from a phenomenon first explained in a 1978 scientific paper called “Collision Frequency of Artificial Satellites: the Creation of a Debris Belt”. The researchers explained how debris from a satellite collision can have a cascading, or chain-reaction, effect with other satellites. Unlike shrapnel here on Earth, which travels for a distance before gravity pulls it to the ground, each piece of collision debris in space just keeps moving, circling the planet in its own independent orbit — until it hits something, or eventually (like, years later) burns up in the Earth’s atmosphere.

Again, this spectacular exchange between facts and creative power in the making of a work of fiction (where the research part both fuels and feeds curiosity) propels it towards greatness. Ignoring the oft-made complaint by aspiring novelists, almost always said as a backhanded compliment, that they fell into the research rabbit-hole, I’d imagine that it is like collecting a lot of useless items, and then wondering how to use them, only to find that those are exactly the blocks required for the foundation of the story.

As a writer of short stories, researching a novel seems a lot of work, and when one is attempting to write 150 pages starting from scratch, it seems overwhelming. However, thinking of it as a summation of small parts, like the parts of a car or of a building as it is engineered, does make it seem easier, and enrapturing.