{"id":43431,"date":"2022-04-26T08:35:35","date_gmt":"2022-04-26T12:35:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/?p=43431"},"modified":"2022-04-26T10:02:05","modified_gmt":"2022-04-26T14:02:05","slug":"alma-katsu-how-to-research-your-historical-novel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/2022\/04\/26\/alma-katsu-how-to-research-your-historical-novel\/","title":{"rendered":"Alma Katsu: How To Research Your (Historical) Novel"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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I came to novel writing after decades working as an intelligence analyst. This means I had tons of experience as a researcher because that\u2019s basically what intelligence analysis is: a research project where, at the end, you brief the President \u00a0of the United States on your findings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

No pressure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As an intelligence analyst, you\u2019re given a topic and it\u2019s your job to learn everything about it in order to understand what the key issues are and the factors driving those issues. You also must figure out what information you need to truly understand the issue, which may not be the information that comes easily to hand. You also must figure out the best way to organize that information, which might amount to thousands of factoids, so that you can not only make sense of it but instantly lay your hands on the citation for any single piece. And lastly, you learn to be quick because you can be called on at any time to brief Congress or the National Security Council.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As it turns out, these are all skills that come in extremely handy when you\u2019re writing a novel, particularly a historical one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Fervor<\/em> (Putnam), which came out on April 26, is my third novel of historical horror. The first was The Hunger<\/em>, a reimagining of the story of the Donner Party, and the second was The Deep<\/em>, which brought this treatment to the sinking of the Titanic. When I was on tour promoting The Hunger<\/em>, I\u2019d have at least one person come up to me at every event to ask how research a historical work, which led me to reflect on my research process for novels. I\u2019ve distilled it into some tips that I hope you find useful.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The number one problem, I heard from writers, is research paralysis. Getting sucked down the rabbit hole and being unable to stop researching and start writing. I\u2019m here to tell you research paralysis is real. The truth of the matter is not that you need more information but that you\u2019re hesitant to start writing. It\u2019s easier to continue doing what you can see\u2014read one more book or spend another afternoon surfing the internet\u2014than to start on more amorphous things like characterization.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s a sign of insecurity, and the answer for that insecurity is to build rigor into your research process.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The number one tip is to define the scope of your research<\/strong>. If you don\u2019t know what your book is about, everything seems important. So: define your book as much as possible before you start researching. Can you limit it to a single historical event\u2014say, one battle instead of all of WWII? You\u2019re writing a novel, not non-fiction: don\u2019t forget that your book is about the characters, a specific plot or story, dialogue, voice, theme. Once you know what it is you\u2019re truly writing about, it becomes easier to rule out huge swaths of background.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Your research should serve the story, not the other way around.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A lot of research these days is online, which raises the question of evaluating your sources<\/strong>. Can you trust what you read on the internet? Yes, but only with some vetting. Even experienced researchers can have difficulty determining the reliability of sources. Stanford professor Sam Wineburg found that it\u2019s best to think like a fact-checker when evaluating online sources. Think laterally, in other words, checking a fact against a number of different websites\/sources, rather than deciding whether to trust a fact based on how reputable the source website looks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For The Hunger<\/em>, I had to rely on the work of homegrown genealogists or from diaries, so the question was how to decide whether a piece of information was reputable. In intelligence, we develop confidence scores<\/strong>: it\u2019s a way of putting all information on a level playing field. You can work up your own system, but generally it\u2019s done in three tiers:<\/p>\n\n\n\n