As well as failing to regularly update my blog, on account of holidays and the need to read the entirity of Les Mis in the two weeks before the movie comes out, I have been writing fanfiction of sorts about Cicero and Enjolras solving crime. Unexpectedly – yes, I didn’t see this coming – this has led me into the
realm of historical research. I was intending for it to be a small writing project
that I didn’t have to think about seriously, but of course, things never stay
that way. I spent several hours the other day reading up in great detail on
Cicero, to try and gauge how he would respond to being called a patrician. My
several hours of reading the works of Cicero, and then any other writings I
could get my hands on on the internet about Cicero left me with nothing but a
throw-away line that will be read in under a second. But it did raise the
question – how much research is too much?
I’m sure this is a problem that plagues anyone who tries to
write historical fiction, and much more so those who try to write legitimate
fiction that some bizarre sort of fanfiction mash-up, but nonetheless, it’s a
problem. Is it really worth three hours of reading to get one line that doesn’t
reveal anything at all? On the one hand, I did learn that Cicero was horrible
arrogant, but also very witty, and that I’ll have to study Oscar Wilde before I
can write proper Cicero fanfiction. It definitely helped me to get my head around his personality, as well as the setting.
On the other hand, it means that rather than write several
pages – or at the very least one page – in a sitting, I’ve been moving at about
a sentence a day. Even though I’m writing what I plan to be a short story, this
could take me a long, long time.
In search of answers, I headed off into the blogosphere. I
found advice ranging from “do the most research you possibly can” to “find a
happy medium” to “you can write your story and then do the research”. The first raises the obvious problem that if
you do the most research you possibly can, you will wind up a very old academic
expert, with no historical fiction to your name. On the other hand, if you
write before you research, your story might inadvertently hinge on something
that couldn’t possibly have actually occurred, and the whole thing with fall to
pieces. And as for finding the happy medium – it’s a great piece of advice, but
where? and how? Beyond suggesting that you have to get your head around
vagaries of speech and dress, nobody seems to have any idea.
I don’t have a solution to this problem yet, so I’m mostly
writing this post in the hope that someone will comment with a magical answer.
I don’t think there is one, but I like to pretend there might be. Does anyone
have an answer? Have do you find the balance between research and writing?
