Small Research

I’ve spoken before about the research I’ve done for some of my books, but I recently came to the revelation that the amount of research done is often only done in support of a small portion of the story.  While readers come to fiction for…well…fiction, one cannot go too out there and must remain somewhat grounded in the realm of the real world.  That means medical terminology must make sense, and laws need to work the way they’re supposed to.

This means that research is important, no matter how small the portion of the story you are working on.  As I was working on my newest novel, there’s a portion of the book where the main characters are trying to figure out how to erase the memories of some prisoners they have.  Knowing that just going into pseudo-technobabble would be immediately seen through by most readers – sci-fi readers tend to be fairly well-grounded in their knowledge, at least on the surface – I had to research how memories are formed and what is involved in their storage from short term to long term memory.  It was a minor part of a small portion of the story, but it still took an hour to gain enough of an understanding of in order to sound credible.  And this isn’t the first time such a thing has happened.

If a writer just wants to put out garbage, then research is unnecessary.  However, readers with even an ounce of sophistication will figure it out and put your book away as unworthy of their time.  That’s a recipe for a short career.  So research as you can, making educated assertions into the unknown when there’s no other choice.  Of course, being verbose as we are, we also need to incorporate that research into organic story points rather than just try to demonstrate how much we’ve learned, and that can be a challenge unto itself given our egos.