On Writing and Research

When I speak to schools about creative writing, I take two New Yorker covers with me. One of the illustrations is of a monkey at a typewriter appearing at first baffled, next terrified and furious, and then finally having that wondrous Eureka! moment when the ideas hit and he starts typing.  The other is of a man literally putting pencil to the floor, writing himself into a corner. (That’s what happens when the author doesn’t have an outline, I joke!)

I try to make light of the writer’s block pictured in the cartoons because so many students feel failure if perfect paragraphs don’t just gush out of them into the computer, or inspiration doesn’t fall like a gentle rain, saturating them with ideas – GOOD ideas. Here’s the deal. Few people write as poet Robert Frost described his methodology: “You catch a poem just as it comes.”

Writing is great fun, incredibly rewarding, but it takes work. As Thomas Edison said of his 1,093 patents, including the light bulb which forever changed mankind’s lifestyle: “Genius is 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration.”

Writing is about sweating it out, digging through your life, your experiences, painstaking research, the newspapers, conversations you overhear in the hallways, or the questions that dog you about why people act they way they do. Many stories can come from your own internal thoughts and reactions, but a writer also has to be capable of watching and listening to others. A real writer will not only explain what he or she feels, but also decipher and then describe what the person across the room is thinking. Perhaps I feel this way because of my many years as a journalist reporting and writing about others. I really believe that the best writer is a little bit of an eavesdropper, with a painter’s eye for details, a psychologist’s empathy, an idealist’s hope, and a detective’s ability to find clues and the truth.

What helps build those qualities in a would-be writer? Here’s what I think—but please remember there is no precise prescription for creativity.

1. Read. Read a variety of genres and styles and authors. Take note what type of writing best suits a scene. Remember that language has a music and cadence of its own. (A chase scene, for instance, may be best told with staccato and succinct words and actions. That being said, there is probably a scene of an exhausted person searching for another, where long, lagging words will convey the character’s despair far better!) If you particularly like an author’s style, try to write a few passages like his or hers, just as apprentices learned to make their own art by mimicking the work of seasoned masters.
   
   (I should confess right now that I was not a youngster walking around with a book glued to my face. So don’t worry if you don’t devour a book a week. BUT do pay attention when you read, take note of things that capture and keep your attention or delight you with their beauty. Really absorb it.)
   
   
2. Keep a journal. But don’t just write down thoughts about your own life or inner turmoils. Those are powerful insights and revelations, of course, but also look up from your notebook and describe what you see. Write down snippets of conversations. Go to the mall, sit down and watch for an hour. Imagine what the people passing in front of you have come to buy, what sacrifices they might have to make to do so, where they are going later. See if their behavior tells you about who they are, what their dreams might be, what their mood is that day. Go outside and describe the sunset, how it changes the clouds it seeps across. Try to include as many senses possible —sight, sound, touch, taste, smell. Write down words you particularly like the sound of, quotes that inspire you, newspaper headlines that disturb you. Do little character sketches. (One I did when I was in 7th grade eventually was the spark for Doc in Flying South.) Attempt poetry. Write sentences of alliteration (words beginning with the same letter or sound) and see how many words you can put together that still make sense like: “worried writers whine and wail and wait for wanton words to waltz across the white page.” Ha-ha!  These are all little exercises to practice the craft of writing—just like musicians practice scales to perfect their fingering and tone to prepare for playing real pieces.
   
   
3. Write for the student newspaper or magazine. I firmly believe that journalism (factual or nonfiction writing) is one of the best preparations for creating fiction. Journalism teaches you to make a deadline, to stop obsessing over that one paragraph and to finish a story. It demands clarity. It teaches you “to write to space,” to find the one pithiest and best word instead of using a string of good, but slightly less specific ones. It forces you to take editing from smart people. (Everyone needs an editor to help add that final polish or tweak.) Your fiction dialogue will be far more believable if you interview people for newspaper profiles for a while first. I discovered how people really speak by interviewing them and writing down exactly what they said word for word. I also learned to look for that revealing detail, that shows rather than tells, what a person is truly feeling. Sometimes the way someone says something (if they shift uncomfortably, look away, or become more animated) is as important as the words they use. Including those descriptive details paints a far more comprehensive portrait.
   
   
4. Read your writing out loud to yourself. Listen for a beat, a crescendo, a rhythm. It’s the best way to hear the words or phrases that need to come out or be elongated, if you have repeated something or explained too much. If I stumble over a passage, if my tongue trips up on itself as I read, I have some serious rewriting to do.
   
   
5. Take writing classes. I add this caution—go to them wanting to learn, to grow. Work hard. Leave arrogance at the door. But don’t let anyone discourage you. Judgments on creative writing are subjective. I had one professor who definitely did not think that I had what it took to become a professional writer. I promise you I have written far more books than he has! I received more than a dozen rejection letters before my first picture book manuscript was accepted. So have courage and determination if you want to write. You do expose your soul and there will be some bruises along the way. One of my journalism colleagues once compared writing to standing in your boxer shorts in front of the world! 
   
   But it’s so important to take the risk if you have something to say, a story to share. We humans are the only species on this planet blessed with the gift of words – to celebrate, contemplate, mourn or rejoice, and hopefully better our existence. It’s well worth the work and sweat to write.

Where do my ideas come from mostly? RESEARCH! Here is my most favorite part of writing to talk about. What? Research? you gasp. Yes. Believe me—research is the treasure hunt, the place where you find the gems of a story, what makes the actual writing easier. Let me give you a few examples.

Let’s start with A Troubled Peace. I always read novels, biographies, newspaper articles, and memoirs from the time period before I begin writing one of my historical novels. I essentially report my novels just as I did my magazine stories. My research, the things I discover, tells me what to write. When researching 1945 France, I read of the staggering price of eggs, Parisians being rationed to one hour of electricity a day and a bath every three; riots over strawberries and butter; people jailed for fighting over matches because replacement boxes could not be found; and catch phrases such as “la femme au turban” for women who wore scarves on their heads to try to hide the fact they had been collaborators with the Nazis and punished for it by angry mobs shaving their heads. These are details that really show what my characters, Henry, Pierre, and Claudette were living through.

I discovered a Q and A pamphlet titled “112 Gripes about the French,” issued in 1945 by the Information and Educational Division of the U.S. Occupational Forces. It filled my head with the era’s lingo like “getting soaked” for paying too much for something, a good-looking girl being “a dish” or a fancy restaurant being “swank.”  Photographs of the time inspired characters—like a gaunt girl who sold milk from a cart being drawn by a large dog. Looking at the photo I started wondering, imagining—what happened to the pony that would usually pull the wagon for her? Killed? Stolen? Eaten? How would that affect a teenage girl and how she might interact with Henry? You’ll meet the character that photo sparked in my imagination in chapter Chapter Thirteen. I think her presence does a lot of illustrate Henry’s personality and how stark France was at the time.

Two lines from the preface to the novel Suite Francaise spawned many of the plot twists of my A Troubled Peace.  Suite Francaise is about the German occupation of France and was written by Irene Nimerovsky, a well-known Jewish author. She was deported and died in Auschwitz. Her small daughters managed to carry the manuscript with them as their governess hid them. The two lines had to do with her daughters standing at the Gare de l’Est railway station, holding up signs with their names, hoping Irene or their father would be among the thousands of returning concentration camp survivors stumbling off those trains. That image of Nimerovsky’s children haunted me and told me that was where Henry needed to look for Pierre. Until I read those two lines, I had had no good idea where to begin.

Take this from Under a War-torn Sky. I wanted to show the reader how cold, how scary those B-24 mission flights were. Research gave me the details to do that vividly: The boys in those planes had to wear bright-blue long johns that were wired like electric blankets and plugged into the plane’s circuitry because the plane’s guns were shot through open bays, bringing the air temperatures in the bomber to 30 degrees below zero. If the gunners took off their fleece-lined gloves for a better grip their hands would freeze to the metal. Every 20 minutes they had to squeeze their oxygen masks to break up spit from their shouting that had frozen and could cut off their airflow. If they had to bail out of a burning plane onto Nazi-occupied territory all their survival kit contained was four syringes of morphine, a can of rations, a candy bar, an escape map of France, a few bills of French money, and a small pamphlet that translated phrases like, “I am in a hurry” and “Heil Hitler,” into four different languages. Not a whole lot to protect them.

The opening paragraphs of Annie, Between the States provide a perfect example of how research can save a writer in one of those moments of blocked thinking, like that of the chimpanzee and typewriter in the New Yorker cartoon. One of the truisms 18 years as a magazine journalist taught me was not to pussyfoot around in a story’s “lede”—to drop the reader right into the thick of things. So, if I wanted my heroine, Annie, “between the states,” caught in the middle—the middle of battles, the middle of divided and heartbreaking loyalties, the middle of disturbing ethical questions—I needed to plop her right into it. So, I start with the First Battle of Manassas, cannons blasting, cavalry jumping fences, terrified men racing through cornfields to escape gunfire, wounded men groaning.

But how to insert a teenage girl into this? From my reading, I knew that the ill-prepared armies of North and South left behind hundreds of wounded on that battlefield. I knew that medicine was primitive—lint scraped from petticoats and sheets was used to staunch bleeding (think of that fluff you pull out of dryers). Wounds were stitched together with the long strong hair of horse’s tails. I knew that society frowned on women dealing with blood, or touching men they didn’t know, and yet, here were all these boys—blue and gray—lying on the ground before the women of Manassas. I knew that soldiers were often saved from death by bullets deflecting off the bundles of letters or books they carried in their breast pockets. And, from a list of 1860s sayings that I had compiled, was this great phrase for being stupid: pea-wit (isn’t that wonderfully pictorial? A brain the size of a pea!)

So here’s my “lede” scene: Annie, whose brother is out there fighting somewhere with the Virginia cavalry, is confronted with a Union soldier lying on her aunt’s front porch, bleeding, she believes, to death. The opening line: “Stop being such a pea-wit,” Annie mumbles to steel herself to cram a ball of lint into his wound. But first she has to unbutton his jacket, which she is afraid to do. Ultimately, her mother has to treat the man. And it is she who discovers that the Union officer has been saved by a book of Keats poetry that stopped a bullet from piercing his heart and instead simply tore open a gash along his chest. Annie, a voracious reader, is surprised to find her “enemy” would enjoy such gentle verse. It is the beginning of a young cloistered girl having to face the outside world, in a war on her doorstep. It is the beginning of her questioning the dogma of the war. It is the beginning of Annie, caught “between the states,” –all within a few paragraphs.

And one final example from Give Me Liberty, which was really research-driven. I based most of my characters on real-life people and situations I read about in ads or articles in the Virginia Gazette of the time. In a two-paragraph description (in a rather dry historical journal), I discovered a little known but crucial battle in December 1775 at Great Bridge, just outside Norfolk, Virginia. Here ragtag volunteers stood up to well-equipped, professional British soldiers and sent them running after only 20 minutes of fighting.

The battle was a perfect climatic ending to my book. It also pushed me to create two characters with very different experiences in their quest for liberty. Here’s why: runaway slaves fought at the Battle of Great Bridge, not for the Americans, but for the Redcoats, as part of the Royal Ethiopian Regiment. They mocked Patrick Henry’s galvanizing slogan “Liberty or Death” which the Virginia regiments embroidered on their hunting shirts—by wearing a sash that read: “Liberty to Slaves.” That terrible irony insisted that I create two characters with opposing story lines, a slave (Moses) with the British Ethiopians who had to face off with a close friend (Nathaniel) fighting with the patriots. A writer can’t make-up something that “good,” that compelling or thought-provoking.

Discovering that one little battle provided me with an action-packed ending, two main characters, an important and surprising plot twist, a moral dilemma, and an important secondary theme—how people had to seek liberty in different, dangerous, and sometimes disappointing ways. Two little paragraphs.

See? Research is GOOD! Writing is like building a drip sand castle – detail upon detail to make a sentence, a paragraph, a page, a chapter, a book. You create those drips by mixing your research with your imagination, just as you mix sand and water together to build that castle. It’s easy, really.

Good luck. Have fun. Keep the faith in yourself.