R is for Research by Carol Harrison

 

R is for Research

I have loved research since grade school. One of my favourite assignments in elementary and high school involved researching and writing an essay. I enjoyed the facts I could find and the opportunity to learn more about various subjects.

As a writer, research is important whether we are writing fiction or non fiction. A website called Lumen Learning posted this on their webpage to answer the question, what is research in writing?

“Research is the physical process of gathering information and the mental process of deriving the answer to your question from the information you gathered”

In fiction this can be about your characters’ behaviour or idiosyncrasies. It can involve researching cultural and social context and historical details. Making sure you find the answers to questions about your characters, your settings, and your historical accuracy can help give you confidence in your material.

When I was writing A Mother for Anna, which is set in 1903, I used the term “milk mustache”. One of my early readers asked me if that was a term commonly used during that time frame. I assumed it must have been, but further research showed me the term didn’t get coined until in the 1920’s. A little detail but by changing it my novel became more accurate.

Where can you find materials?

1.     Start with what you already know. This might be snippets of family stories, photos of people, clothing, housing, or any other details. For my Prairie Hope series, I had those little nuggets of family history that left me asking what else might have happened?  I had old photos to show the clothing of various time periods and also some old family documents.

2.     Access material from a variety of sources.

a.      Archives/ records/ maps

b.     Newspapers

c.      Encyclopedic knowledge – google for valuable insights into various time frames

d.     Libraries

e.      Travel to places to get ideas of the scenery, distances, etc.

f.      Opinions – whether stories of people who lived through an era or opinion pieces from papers.

3.     Organize material. What links together? What is non essential for your writing?

4.     Use the materials to lay basis for plausible story lines.. Ask yourself the question about whether this could have happened by having factual accuracy. The little village of Hepburn in my Prairie Hope series didn’t get a store until 1912. Where did the homesteaders have to travel to get supplies? If I would have had them go to the little village it wouldn’t have been accurate and anyone reading it from the area would have realized that.  If the railroad didn’t go to Hepburn in 1899, where did the settlers disembark and how did they get to their homesteads? Contemporary novels are easier to know details or travel to find out what things are like than needing to rely on historical maps and documents for historical pieces.

Enjoy this part of the writing journey as you delve into the research to help make your writing the most accurate it can be. What sources have you used to help you learn more about a character, place, or era?

 

 Carol Harrison writes and researches from her home in Saskatoon, SK. She also enjoys searching out information on family history.

 

 

Procrastination- Opportunity's Enemy - Sulo Moorthy

Once upon a time I enjoyed cooking. I took great pleasure in turning out new recipes and getting compliments from family and friends. Not wanting to see my culinary talent go waste, my entrepreneurial husband encouraged me to write a cook book. I liked the idea. But I didn’t know how to write a cook book. So, when I saw an advertisement in a magazine for a writing course by the Institute of Children’s Literature, I quickly enrolled myself in it. Then being unfamiliar with the craft of writing, I must have assumed that any kind of writing course would enable me to write a cook book. But by the time I finished my course, my interest in writing a cookbook had vanished and I ended up not writing one. However, I have no regrets for taking the writing course that taught me the ABC of creative writing.

Even though, the course prepared me well to write for children, I preferred to write for adults instead. Except for my short poem titled, Is Christmas Your Birthday, Jesus? which got published in our church bulletin, and my story on the life of Brother Yun-the Heavenly Man, which got published in children’s magazines Partners, and Guide, I hadn’t published or written anything for children in the last fifteen years of my writing life.

But lately, to my surprise, a nudge to write a children’s story has been following me for weeks. As always, I’ve tried to give all the excuses why I cannot do it, but found no luck with it. Interestingly, even the story line has started to shape in my head with names for the characters, and a childhood memory as the background. But I couldn’t make myself to sit down and write out even the first sentence onto my computer screen. I kept procrastinating it.

The term 'procrastination', which derived from a Latin word means,“ to put off for tomorrow.”

“The things all writers do best is to find ways to avoid writing,” wrote Alan Dean Foster.

Since I give into procrastination easily, I did a little research recently to find out what causes us to procrastinate. I learned that procrastination can be triggered for many reasons, and it doesn’t always affect for the same reason. In certain stressful situations, it works as a coping mechanism to keep the stress level under control. At times, overwhelmed with the project in hand, the brain refuses to cooperate with our schedules. It is at this time, we tend to distract ourselves with trivial activities like returning phone call, scanning the e-mails, dusting the sofas or walking the dog instead of doing the important project- writing in our case.

Usually when we procrastinate, we tell ourselves that we'd start our writing, when we get enough ideas or mood to write. But according to Julia Cameron, the author of The Right to Write, the process actually works backward. “It’s the act of writing that calls ideas forward, not ideas that call forward writing.” She encourages us to have more than one writing project so that we don’t get stuck with one, when ideas or words fail to flow. A writer who is not writing can be filled with self-loathing and guilt stricken, she writes.

Cameron suggests a daily habit of writing three pages in long hand or having Artist Date to create an inner welling up of thoughts and ideas that will become more and more pressing to put on the page. Lack of motivation, fatigue, fear of failure, perfectionism or laziness could give rise to procrastination.

At times, not knowing where or how to start could lead to it. Once something has a beginning and end,, it’s easier to visualize what’s in the middle. So, it’s better to work from both ends and fill in the middle later. To get through perfectionism, we need to give ourselves permission to write sloppy first draft. Otherwise, we wouldn’t get through our beginning sentence without pressing the delete button a number of times. I speak out of my own experience for I know too well how many days I used to spend on my first draft in the beginning of my writing years. Thankfully I’ve got better with time, but still some remnant of it shows up now and then.

Now that I’ve learned the reasons behind procrastination and not to put off for tomorrow what I can do today, I hope I'd be able to write down the children’s story in my head sooner than later.

“ Procrastination is the thief of time, collar him.” ~ Charles Dickens