Good Research Tips
When you're not writing what you know
There were certain lines I never planned to cross when
I started thinking of myself as a professional writer. One of them was to keep
the genres I loved separate from attempting to make them my work. My theory was based on keeping my play time safe and respected. I am a historian but
don’t spend a lot of time writing fictional history. I broke that line for a
very good reason early in my career for the sake of my love of local history and
to keep stories in the forefront that might otherwise be lost. I’d also planned
to support local societies with the earnings, but that means one has to earn something first. The idealism was long gone by the time the children’s books
came out. I stuck a toe over the historical fiction line one other time for a
novella in my "protest the prairie cover" days—again, mostly for fun and to help
my fellow writers, which was the result of that project.
My secret passion is fantasy…not going there! My
not-so-secret reading passion has always been science fiction, ala Robert Heinlein
who got me through the traumas of middle school and Ray Bradbury who I still
think is the most brilliant writer of the twentieth century. It’s basically
stories of the human condition put on trial in the most brutal ways. I have
been heavily influenced by a movie called The Abyss and a newer one
called Arrival. The first story has nothing to do with the aliens who
abide deep in Earth’s oceans and use water like we use elements of the Earth’s
crust; likewise the second has not much to do with why they are here at this
time and in those places. The films have everything to do with relationships
and how we treat each other.
When I started thinking about the third story in my Forces of Nature series which began firmly planted on the planet with exploring a younger man-older woman relationship and what marriage is all about in Meander Scar, and moved next to study lost love found and life secrets that color everything about a mother and daughter who reach out to both repel and cling to a man who betrayed them unwittingly in Centrifugal Force, it was a series title that flung me toward the sun. Outer space is not a place I wanted to take my characters but they will not stay grounded. My characters even forced me to meet and describe a race of people from a different solar system and test my world-building skills, which I thought were fairly well grounded (worksheet here).
These off-worlders keep secrets from me, like how they got
here, but so far I’m okay with that. After all, the story isn’t really about
them. It’s about making choices based on who we are and how we practice our
humanity, no matter what heavenly body we call home. At some point in each of
the films I mentioned earlier, the main characters realize they don’t have to
know everything. Too many details and technicalities can mess with story,
depending on your audience.
The off-worlders showed up in a scene that technically took
place before this story starts—something I didn’t realize when my male
protagonist, Harry, meets them. How am I going to figure out what’s happening?
I approach research with the same exactly detail I put into all of my work.
Most of the facts of how something works aren’t going into the narrative, but I
need to understand them to give my readers a reason to accept their disbelief
for a short time. Harry got a whiff of chlorine when he met Tarlig, who at
first glance doesn’t look all that different from any other odd-looking
scientist. The chlorine odor was explained by his perception that it was
associated with cleaning solutions. In reality, Tarlig’s world and make-up use
more chlorine than humans use other elements of Earth’s crust and atmosphere. I
kept trying to exchange argon, the third most abundant gas that makes up part
of our atmosphere after nitrogen and oxygen, but argon is a noble gas, an
element that stabilizes, and chlorine is not. What kind of a creature that
essentially exists much like a human would be like if it respirated a different
atmospheric and planetary element than argon? As I studied the atmosphere and
the elemental properties of the noble gases further, I attempted to replace
chlorine with a noble gas like xenon or radon, but they don’t have an odor. Come on…it’s so early in the book, I can set
this character up any way I want without having to reweave story elements.
Besides, it’s fiction! Who’s going to care?
I am. And so should my readers who I want to trust me. It’s
not so much a matter of making copper-based hemoglobin so a Vulcan bleeds green
or an Andorian whose skin is blue from cobalt. We didn’t care back then how
science fiction worked. But now we have space stations where people can live
for years, and reusable rocket boosters and all kinds of science that was once
fiction but no longer. (They can bury my flip phone with me.)
Tarlig and Verdun’s existence is important to my story only
so much as they add to my story arc in a way nothing else can, and move my
people to prove their quality…their worth, and why they act and react the way
they do. I’m the only one who will care that Tarlig and Verdun will need to
have extra heavy lungs to expel what on Earth is an extra heavy element that
will burn the lungs of a human. I only care that they smell vaguely like
chlorine and want to sell you, the reader, on this tiny little thing that will
make them believably different.
There’s plenty of other stuff in the background which
involved research—little things like DNA, military stuff, and a pesky little
detail about how to put a colony on the moon, but you only need to read the
finished project.
Oh, the title? Parhelion – sundogs, you might know them –
those beautiful columns of light on either side of the sun, glittering with ice
crystals. (Photo from Iowa, 2015, Dave Chesling)