This week: Research Edited by: Robert Waltz  
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Money won't buy happiness, but it will pay the salaries of a large research staff to study the problem.
—Bill Vaughan
If you steal from one author it's plagiarism; if you steal from many it's research.
—Wilson Mizner
If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?
—Albert Einstein |
One of the most useless tidbits of writing advice, especially for Fantasy writers, is "Write what you know." If we all followed that advice, there wouldn't be an Oz or a Wonderland or a Coruscant; no Vulcans, no Discworld, no hobbits or fairies. Boring.
No, I like to turn that old canard around: Know what you write.
But in order to do that, sometimes you have to go beyond what you already know. This can be described as "work," but I'm allergic to work, so I call it "research," though research in Fantasy writing is a bit different than for other genres (except maybe science fiction): you're not always writing about stuff that exists in consensus reality.
For example, if you're writing an action story, hopefully there's a car chase in there somewhere, because car chases are awesome. But you run into a wall if you "write what you know": fortunately, you've never been in a car chase. Sure, you've been in a car, possibly even driven one, but not doing 110mph down a city street with pedestrians (hopefully) ducking out of the way and lights and sirens behind you. Well, I assume you haven't. If you have, please write about it. Anonymously, if necessary.
Still, cars, at least, exist in consensus reality. But I can guarantee you've never been in a spaceship chase, and it's extremely unlikely that you've ever been chased, or chased someone else, on dragonback. But suddenly, you find yourself having written yourself into a corner, where the only way out is to describe a spaceship (or dragon) chase scene.
Without any real-world spaceships or dragons to draw on, what do you do to make it believable? Well, one obvious thing would be to use aircraft to start. You'd get the three-dimensional aspect (too many spacecraft chase scenes are like "We have to go through this asteroid field!" as if one couldn't get around it by remembering you can go above/below the hurtling space rocks), though it's still not exactly the same thing. The rest, you do have to fill in with imagination, and maybe some basic knowledge of Newtonian physics.
Sure, you can hand-wave any inconsistencies with the all-powerful word "magic," but that can leave a bad taste in some readers' gullets, like when you end a story with "And then he woke up."
Point is, though, probably your only experience with airplanes was being packed like a sardine into the steerage section of some jetliner. Not exactly piloting experience.
Hence, research. As a bonus, when you're done, you've hopefully learned something new, and that's always a good thing. But mainly, putting in the work, even the parts that don't make it into the story, lends the tale a bit of realism. And even Fantasy needs some realism. |
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Fantasy: June 25, 2025 Issue [#13205]
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