THE FINE ART OF MAKING STUFF UP

Julie, here, and I gotta tell you that this post today by guest blogger Siri Mitchell not only made me laugh out loud, but it set me free!

As an author who's terribly allergic to research, I marvel at these detailed author types who scour mountains of books, interview tons of people, and strike out on multiple research trips to their chosen destination. Because, you see, my chosen destination is, uh ... Google, and I was ashamed to admit that before reading Siri's post today. So without further ado, please welcome our delightful guest, award-winning author Siri Mitchell, and be thoroughly liberated and entertained ... not to mention eligible for one of two exciting Siri book giveaways if you leave a comment!

The Fine Art of Making Stuff Up

by Siri Mitchell

On the road to publication, the hope is that if you can just figure out how to write a better book you’ll be able to vault yourself into publication. Common wisdom holds that one of the ways to do this is to make sure you do enough research to get your story details exactly right. It makes sense, doesn’t it? Because as a Christian novelist, you certainly don’t want to lie to anyone about anything! If there’s truth to be found, then we want to do it! And we want our stories to include it.

There’s only one problem with that: we write novels. Novels that are fictional by definition. They’re mostly, in large part, made up. Which means they’re not true. Which might, kind of, sort of, mean that we have to lie. On a regular basis. As part of the profession.

Probably that won’t take anyone by surprise. At least not consciously. But really, you have to kind of admit that sometimes, as novelists, we get carried away with our research. The problem occurs when we let that research carry away our stories.

Let me give you some examples. With all of my novels, I’m reading between 20 and 30 printed books and accessing well over 200 websites or internet pages as I research. In fact, I’m known for my heavily-researched novels. So I’m not advocating that you make everything up. But with my Elizabethan, A Constant Heart, I became so obsessed with ‘getting it right’ that I was determined to track down where Queen Elizabeth and her court had been, on any given day, during the years my story took place. (There were at least five or six of them and she traveled about her kingdom quite a bit.) With my Revolutionary War-spy novel, The Messenger, I was determined to figure out exactly how an escape from a Philadelphia prison was planned and executed even though the only detail I could find was the date on which it happened. For my pen name (Iris Anthony) book, The Miracle Thief, I decided I needed to know when – exactly – a treaty was agreed to and when it was enacted…even though there were no chroniclers of that era during the Dark Ages and the best clue I could find was that the treaty was agreed to in ‘autumn’ of the year 911.

All of those details, I can now say without an inkling of doubt, were impossible to discover. But that didn’t mean that I didn’t spend weeks trying to find them. I wanted the story to be right. And how could I get it right if I didn’t know the facts?

Well…I could do what I ended up doing. I could decide that, my goodness, if I couldn’t find the information after a several-week search, it certainly wasn’t general knowledge. But…what if it was specialized knowledge? What if the half-dozen of my readers who were experts in the Elizabethan era/Revolutionary War period/Dark Ages knew all of those things by heart? What if they learned it in Queen Elizabeth 101? Maybe they give you tables of all 44 years of her Outlook or Google schedules on the first day of class. Or maybe the top-secret spy mission that was carried out during the Revolutionary War by less than a dozen patriots was published as a popular tell-all in some book that everybody but me has access to.

What if they do? What if it was?

What if some people do know all those things? How many of them are likely to read my books? One or two? And is my not-knowing-for-positively-sure going to ruin the reading experience for all the rest of my readers?

On one of my visits to the Louvre Museum in Paris (one of the largest and oldest museums in the world), I was wandering through the Near Eastern Antiquities section, browsing the ancient artifacts on display. One of them was a small wooden box with a hole in the top. I wondered what it was, so I stepped forward to read the label. It said, “Box made of wood, with a hole in the top.” Sometimes, even those you’d think ought to know these kinds of details, don’t. So let that be a lesson to us!

The point of fiction writing is to create a story that feels plausible according to its setting and era without violating the known facts (unless, of course, you’re writing an alternative history). That means you have to do enough research to know what makes sense. I’m not letting you off the hook for that! Efficiency is not often a word applied to writing, but it still absolutely applies to research. If you’re like me, you have better things to do with your writing time than chase a rabbit trail through time and space. Sometimes – and you’re going to have to learn to be okay with this – you’re just going to have to make stuff up. So with that dark day in mind, here are some tips to help you do it:

           

1.     Recognize that trying to completely, authentically replicate a setting or person isn’t just impossible, it would probably also be really boring. Authentic reproduction isn’t what you’re after. Creating a convincing illusion is.

2.     Give yourself permission to say enough is enough. Those books of mine I mentioned might have been marginally better if I had been able to find the facts I was looking for. In some cases those facts might have even altered the plot, but really, it wouldn’t have affected the quality of the actual story. Those details really weren’t necessary to my stories and the time I put into finding them, had a diminishing return for a novelist. Maybe not for a historian, but you’re not one of those, are you? Giving up on finding a detail doesn’t make you a failure, it makes you a competent manager of your precious resource of time.

3.    If it really gives you hives to even dream that you’ve overlooked some important detail that everyone might know, then place your story in an unusual setting or era. (see Puritan Massachusetts colony in Love’s Pursuit; the Boston of Italian immigrants in A Constant Heart; a St. Louis candy-making family in Unrivaled; Louis XIII’s court in The Ruins of Lace; or the Dark Ages of France in The Miracle Thief). 

4.     Be confident. It’s not necessary to feel apologetic for not tumbling down every mole hole in your research. There’s nothing easier to detect than insecurity in writing. You’re the master of your story and the more you write around that one elusive detail, the more you try to explain away its absence, the more you point out that it’s just not there. So make it up and move on.

5.     If you’re going to make up a detail, you don’t have to go into great detail about it. The trick to making stuff up is to not overdo it. Oftentimes people who lie reveal their subterfuge by talking too much. A sleight of hand is usually just a slight movement. Same with making stuff up. 

6.     If it’s not important, it’s not important. I’ve spent too much time trying to find era-specific names for things like colors. Pea-colored green works just as well as azoff green, doesn’t? And it’s more descriptive too. If it doesn’t affect a plot point, make it up. (On the other hand, do use the ‘telling detail’ that fixes your story in time and place. Who but the Victorians would have used a celery server? Where but in the South can you buy boiled peanuts?)

7.     If exact location isn’t critical to your story, set it in a fictional place. I do this for my French historicals, gleaning the popular suffixes or prefixes of the region’s towns and re-combining them for an authentic-sounding name. A fictional place gives you all sorts of leeway. Then you can locate it on the most convenient train-line or stagecoach route or river. (Or near none of them at all!) And you can also say terrible things about its inhabitants and without living in fear that someone’s going to accuse you of slander.

8.     I do the same thing with titled nobles. 

  9.     Travel is overrated. I used to be a terrible snob about this, declaring that no one could write convincingly about a place they’d never visited. I’ve changed my mind. Mostly because I can’t afford to do all that traveling. So how can you fake it?

  a.     By looking at photos on Snapfish or Shutterfly or personal blogs from other people’s vacations. They’ve given me some great scene ideas and descriptive details. Just do an image search on the internet.

   b.     Tell yourself it doesn’t matter. Sometimes even visiting places like London won’t do much for you if your novel is set in the distant past (Middle Ages, Tudor, Restoration). I keep telling myself over and over again that even if I were able to go visit my setting, I wouldn’t be able to see it as it was back then.

c.     Use your personal sensory experiences to give life to your novel. Have you ever scuffed your way across a stone floor or stood in the middle of a building with a soaring ceiling? Then you can place a character quite convincing in a medieval cathedral. Have you ever been so cold you didn’t even have the energy to move? Then you can write convincingly about how most characters from pre-history – 1920 felt in the winter inside their own homes.

10.  Use a calendar. Some writers like to track down the lunar calendar for their stories so that they’ll portray the phases of the moon correctly, but as long as you plug your scenes into a calendar at some point, you’re probably not going to err by having a full moon two weeks in a row. Or by having six months of a blazing hot summer. Besides, is anyone going to read your 1843 historical with a lunar calendar in hand? (If they do, then they don’t deserve happiness.)

11.  Pay attention to your adjectives. I had a terrific editor once who pointed out that when I was referencing age or minutes or distance in one of my novels, everything was ‘about seventy’. A character was about seventy years old. The wait was about seventy minutes. The distance to where they were driving was about seventy miles. I’ve also had the phrase ‘the smallest of’ appear in a novel, multiple times. So even when you’re making stuff up, you still need to exercise your creativity.

12.  Do some triage. In both my Iris Anthony books (The Ruins of Lace and The Miracle Thief), terrain figured very heavily into a couple of my pivotal scenes. In the former, I needed a really rocky mountain/hill because I had to have a coffin slide off a wagon and crack open as it dashed against the rocks. In the latter, I needed an avalanche a bit earlier in the season then would normally be the case. Neither scene necessarily made a lot of sense in the settings so I had to make a choice: head way south where there was rocky terrain and there were higher, rougher mountains or give up a bit of accuracy to work within my story’s time-line constraints. I decided the time constraints were more important, so I made up the rocky hill and imagined an early and brutal winter. 

13.  Use common sense. I once heard a writer castigate a novel because ‘no one did that sort of thing back then’ when the novel took place. I happened to know, because I knew the era, that sort of thing did happen once or twice. It wasn’t a common occurrence, but then novelists don’t generally write about the normal choices or things people do every day as a matter of course. We write about the uncommon. It’s probably not a good idea to write a 1976 Chevy into a Tudor setting, but putting one of only 9,000 DeLorean cars that were ever made into the movie Back to the Future worked really well. Sure, it might not be probable, but the better question to ask yourself is, ‘Is it possible?’

14.  Stop trying to collect points. There are none in writing anyway. The sad truth is that no one knows what kind of stories are going to sell. There are no magic formulas. There is no sure-fire, guaranteed method to ensure that what you write is going to gain you representation or place you on the bestseller list. So the idea that doing extra-hard, super obscure research earns you extra points isn’t just a fantasy, it’s wasting your time. The thing is to finish the book you started and then launch it out into the world. And even then, you still won’t get any points. Sorry!

15.  Understand that you are going to get it wrong sometimes. And I’m talking about those things you’ve already researched. That puts making stuff up in a whole new light, doesn’t it? I don’t know how many websites I visited to figure out what kind of instruments might have been played (and by which gender) during the Elizabethan period. Let’s just say lots. And I still managed to work an instrument into my mix that wouldn’t have existed back then. Which leads to…

16.  Practice saying, ‘Oh, well.’ You can even practice saying it with an exclamation point: ‘Oh, well!’ I tried my best when I wrote that Elizabethan novel. I know you do too. We all make mistakes in our writing. Thankfully, the world doesn’t end and no actual people die. It’s never fatal. Oh, well!

17.  Understand that details serve your story. It’s not the other way around. People are going to be amazed at your book, not because you finally figured out what the French call that weird wavy latch on their window sills or because you finally got to the root of that mysterious throwaway comment you read in an interview somewhere about the real purpose of lap dogs in the Middle Ages, but because you told a compelling story.

So I am passing my Pinocchio nose on to you. Go forth. Do your job as a novelist. Start making stuff up! And feel free to share with the rest of us: do you tend to be a nitty-gritty researcher or a carefree maker-upper? Or maybe you’ve hit a wall in your story research. Is there something we can help you make up?

GIVEAWAY:

Leave a comment or question, and you'll be entered to win one of two giveaways from Siri -- a signed copy of her latest release, Love Comes Calling or her latest indie book written under the pseudonym Iris Anthony, The Miracle Thief. 

ABOUT SIRI:

Siri Mitchell is the author of over a dozen novels, among them the INSPY Award-winning She Walks in Beauty and the critically acclaimed Christy Award finalists Chateau of Echoes and The Cubicle Next Door. She also writes under the pseudonym Iris Anthony. A graduate of the University of Washington’s Foster School of Business, she has worked in many different levels of government. As a military spouse, she lived in places as varied as Tokyo and Paris.

Connect with Siri/Iris at:

Website – http://sirimitchell.com  or http://irisanthony.com

Twitter -@SiriMitchell or @IrisAnthony

Facebook and GoodReads

or on Pinterest – at Siri Mithell or 1risanthony