When does research become an excuse?

HHal Brennan1 wk ago4 replies5

I've got four boxes of parish and colliery records, my grandfather's diary from 1909 to 1914, and 15,000 words of a novel. The ratio worries me.

I'll say the Research Center has made the boxes easier to live with. I've photographed the diary pages and pinned each one to the characters it mentions, so when I'm writing Grandad's brother Albert, his pages are sitting in his Research tab. That part has been a proper help.

What I'd give for it to read Grandad's handwriting, mind. I'm typing the diary out a page a night and it's slow going.

But the real question. How do you know you've done enough research and you're just hiding in it? Asking for a friend with four boxes.

4 replies

PPriya Natarajan1 wk ago
Honest answer from someone with 40 pages on tax law.
The test I use now
Does this change a scene? If a fact changes what a character does, says or fears, it's research. If it only makes me feel more ready, it's procrastination wearing a lanyard.
The embarrassing bit
Most of the tax law failed that test. About two pages passed, and those two pages are now the best subplot in the book.
HHal Brennan1 wk ago
Does it change a scene. I'll pencil that on the bench where I'll see it every morning. Thank you, Priya.
MMargaret Holloway1 wk ago
Dear Hal, I don't think you should be too hard on yourself. I kept bees for forty years before I knew I was researching a novel, and I still look something up every morning.
Priya's test is a very good one and I shall be borrowing it. I have been reading about the history of our parish church for three weeks and I'm afraid none of it has changed a scene yet.
Maggie
BBea Kowalczyk-Hart1 wk ago
Twenty years in a newsroom taught me one rule. You stop researching when you can write the sentence without looking. Then you check it afterwards. Never before.
Typing the diary out isn't procrastination, by the way. Transcription is research that produces words, and plenty of them will end up in the book in some form.
If you haven't already, the county archives will have colliery material your boxes don't. Email them before you visit.
https://www.gloucestershire.gov.uk/archives/
HHal Brennan1 wk ago
I have, and I'll tell you how it went if you've a minute. I went up to Gloucester in the spring for an accident register and came home with the price of a pit pony in 1911, a letter from a vicar complaining about a brass band practising on a Sunday, and nothing whatsoever about the accident. The archivist was very kind about it. She said that's what the building's for.
The diary typing makes me feel better, though. Thank you, Bea.
BBea Kowalczyk-Hart1 wk ago
The brass band letter is a scene, Hal. Don't pretend it isn't.
For the accident, try the local paper for the week after. Inquests were nearly always reported, usually with names, and often in more detail than the official record.
RRuth Pritchard1 wk ago
Hal, I have only just found this and it has been a great comfort. My husband kept the chapel minute books for forty years in his own hand, and I have been reading them in the evenings and calling it 'getting ready'.
I think Priya would say it has changed a scene. I cried at an entry about a Sunday School trip to Porthcawl in 1978, and now I know how the memoir begins.
Diolch, all of you.
God bless, Ruth
HHal Brennan1 wk ago
That's a lovely way to find a beginning, Ruth.
A tip, since we're both reading old hands. Copy out the writer's alphabet one letter at a time from the pages you can already read, and keep it beside you. His capital F will stop looking like an S by the second evening. It did for me with Grandad.

4 replies

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