Beehiiv is where I’ll be sharing a selection of posts from “But anyway, I digress…” which is my regular blog over on my personal website — to see all my posts in full, and for more information about my writing, head over to philipholyman.com
12th March 2024
[Note, added in May 2025 — more than one of my subscribers is an avid gardener, so this old post is well worth me digging up this week. When my blog first started, I focused more specifically on writing, but I think questions about research and what to do with it (or even whether to do it at all) are relevant to all sorts of other creative pursuits as well; its nourishing or smothering effects will simply reveal themselves differently, according to your chosen medium.)
Brilliant stuff from Ursula K. Le Guin in her revised edition of Steering The Craft: A 21st-Century Guide to Sailing The Sea of Story — the bold type is my doing:
“Study this piece of false history and invented information till you’re familiar with it. Then use it as the foundation of a story or a scene. As you write the scene, compost the information: break it up, spread it out, slip it into conversation or action-narration or anywhere you can make it go so it doesn’t feel Lumpy. Tell it by implication, by passing reference, by hint, by any means you like. Tell it so readers don’t realise they’re learning anything.”
How much research to do, and then what to do with it, has always been something I’ve struggled with, no matter whether I’m writing for theatre, writing prose, shaping the texts for exhibitions, or anything else.
There’s always a feeling that you’re supposed to do research and to a point, that seems fair enough, if you want — or more importantly need — your work to be factually correct.
[Note — the older I get, the less bothered I am about the importance of being “factually correct”, or at least, the less reliant on “factual correctness” I feel I have to be.]
The telling of certain kinds of stories (in any artform) is obviously strengthened [Note — to an extent] by a skeleton of diligent research, which often prompts people to respond to such stories with words like “truthful”, “authentic”, “accurate” and “realistic”.
[Note — “truthful” is, in fact, the very thing I now aim for most, in preference to “factually correct”, especially in terms of the characters I write. Capturing their consistent inconsistency is a major goal for me — and in such a case, what’s “truthful” can often be entirely at odds with “factual correctness.”]
But it’s very easy to fall into a trap of treating research as a supply of ready-made material to shovel straight into your book/story/show, something which needs no editing, no filtering, no alteration — as if it were the fertile soil out of which a satisfying reading/viewing/listening experience can be naturally expected to grow all by itself.
[Note — remember, raw manure is actually incredibly bad for your plants…]
It’s also easy to fall into a trap of simply top-dressing the surface of your story with a layer of research and then leaving it there — a bit like a mulch scattered around a rose bush. Used this way, the work isn’t being nourished by the research — the two things remain separate, and no organic links form between them.
If we writers are all honest with ourselves, because I think we’ve all been guilty of it at some point of another, we sometimes take the soil or mulch approach because we more or less consciously want to make sure the reader/viewer/listener will notice that we’ve done our research and we want to make sure they appreciate us for it.
[Note — and I’m pretty sure most other kinds of creative practitioner would be able to hold their hands up and plead guilty to doing the same thing at times…]
I’m making a conscious effort to focus on Le Guin’s compost approach to research in future, to the point where I’ve already started asking myself, “Am I composting, soiling or mulching here?” while I’m revising a draft of my current novel and while I’m thinking about what’s going into the next two.
[Note — I’m on Notebook 12 of 13 with the epic Obsolete Constellations type-up, so I’m a little while off grappling with the next stage of research for that — but yesterday’s notes session for Draft 3 of my first book R.C. has revealed just how far AI has advanced in the two years since I wrote Draft 1, so there’ll be LOTS that I need to research over the coming months to stop my speculative novel looking hopelessly behind the times…]