When I sat down to write my first novel, I thought it would be a fairly simple task. After all, it was a fiction novel; I was making it all up. But as I got into the meat of the story, I realized that just because the characters, events, and places were fictitious, I still had to create a believable world for my readers.
If I made mistakes in my world building, knowledgeable readers would stumble over them, being reminded that they were, in fact, reading a story. And no author wants their novel to be viewed as “just a story.”
The more I focused on making the atmosphere realistic, the more I realized that the reader would go along with it, even if the events were impossible in our world.
The story I was writing was a paranormal thriller, complete with a ghostly figure haunting the mind of a teenage girl and a true life killer, out for revenge. Some of my elements were make believe, but some of it was not.
At first, I based the setting in a fictitious town in rural Idaho. However, after editing some of the pages, I realized that it didn’t sound believable. After all, I had never been there, so it wasn’t real to me. How could I write something for the reader when I wasn’t digging it myself?
So I changed the setting to closer to home. There’s a small town about thirty miles south that I fell in love with when driving through one day. I could picture my story taking place here, all the way down to the quaint diner. I was drawn to the beauty and mystery of this city.
When I got home I went to my computer to look up the history of the town. I wanted to know how it was established, what took place there and any other interesting facts. That’s when I stumbled upon a mental institution with a long, shady history. I was salivating! These elements fit right into the story line I was creating and I was hooked on finding out more.
All of the research I was working on helped me to mesh the real world with the fake one. I also had a physical place to go for more inspiration, with town’s people to interview if necessary. The research was helping my story come alive. But I didn’t just stagger across it, I went looking!
Now that I had the details, however, I found that I couldn’t stop. I devoted more time to research than I was writing. I thought that I had to get all the research done before I could begin. That’s simply not true.
No matter how much I knew about one subject, I always found more to learn. I had to stop researching and start writing! After I’d written a portion, I would stop, do more research, and then write more. I did find errors along the way, but that’s the beauty of writing: I could go back and fix it.
The best advice I ever got from a fellow author was, “The writing is the fun part, so just enjoy it!” I think about her advice often now when I’m writing. When I first started, I was getting too caught up in wanting everything to be correct and precise, only to come out with a few facts (out of pages of research) that could possibly work with my story.
Too many authors take too much time trying to get every detail correct when telling a story. Sure, if you’re writing a biography about Julius Caesar, you’ll want to get your facts straight. But if you’re writing a tale about a far-off land where magical creatures roam, (or a haunted town) you don’t need to be 100% precise. Your main objective is to tell a compelling story that is realistic enough.
An obstacle I faced was trying to fit in all of the factual information. The problem with that was that the story got bogged down in the “cool” research stuff. Information not necessary to the story was overshadowing the complexity of my plot and characters. It was hard to “let it go” because I invested so much time gathering my data. But in the end, I kept the facts that made the story better and took out the information that detracted from it.
The important thing to remember is that research is vital in making your story sound realistic and even cool. However, too many factual gems can distract your readers from the world you’re creating. Choose the facts that best fit your story, ignore the rest, and don’t apologize for it.
Acknowledgement: “Writing the Paranormal Novel: Techniques and Exercises for Weaving Supernatural Elements into Your Story” by Steven Harper
When Sarah Hunter Hyatt isn’t researching or writing, she chases her three children around Arizona, where she lives with her husband and family. Her short story, “Stunner”, will appear in A Dash of Madness: a Thriller Anthology, to be released July 31, 2013.
