Mentor Monday: Research

I was about a year into the research for Sports and Games of Medieval Cultures when my husband commented, “that’s worse than writing a research paper in college.” My response? “Or better, if you enjoy research!”

One of the most important things we do as non-fiction writers is research. Several of us have written about research on this blog over the years, you can check out a couple of those essays here, here and here. (By the way, did you know you can search our old entries by putting a term, such as "research," into the box on the right, just below the QR code?) But I thought a general overview might be useful for anyone starting out in the non-fiction world.

When I begin to research a new topic, either because I’ve been given an assignment or because it has struck me as having potential for a book or article, I follow a broad-to-focused pattern. If I start with information that is very specialized, I may misunderstand or misinterpret what I find. So I generally start with two kinds of sources which will not wind up in my bibliography: children’s books and encyclopedias.

Both of these will give me broad overviews of my topic, in relatively straightforward, layperson’s language. They will help me get my bearings in a sea of unfamiliar terms and concepts. In the case of an idea I’m researching on spec, they’ll help me decide if I actually want to pursue the topic. I would not cite either in my research bibliography because they are what I would call “tertiary” sources – they’re based on someone else’s research. Most publishers explicitly say “don’t use encyclopedias” – but they don’t mean “don’t read them,” they mean, “don’t base your writing on them.” (see also Wikipedia, below).

Because I write primarily for children and young people, reading children’s books about my topic doubles as market research, helping me establish what is already out there in my field, and what gaps or needs for updates exist. In the American’s Notable Women series we include age-appropriate “for further reading” lists, so I will also note any of the books I read that I think will be suitable for that.

Having gotten some background on my subject from these very wide-angle lenses, I now move on to more focused material. Beginning with any references in the encyclopedia entries and children’s books, I assemble a spreadsheet of any resource I can find. Now I am looking for more in-depth information, so I will hunt down adult books on my subject, articles in both general and trade publications, websites and journals. I include on this list people who I might try to interview – other authors, university professors, and in the case of biographical subjects, people who have spoken about them or who knew them. I’ll be checking Google Books and Google Scholar, the online catalogs of universities (try Harvard's), World Cat and Jstor. I’m also keeping an eye out for primary source material – the golden chalice of biography, words written and spoken by the subject themselves. In the case of a person still working, their own website or columns may be readily accessible, but oftentimes I’m watching for references to letters or diaries in the secondary sources, and drilling down in their bibliographies for the places where those precious documents may be stored. Newspaper archive.com, Highbeam research and Questia are excellent resources (each of those require subscriptions), as are the online archives of major newspapers (The New York Timesarchives are free for material prior to 1923 and since 1986, $3.95/article for things in the 1923-1986 date range: but you can search their index and then take your list of hits to a library with the NYT microfilm, read and print out what is pertinent.)

A word of caution here – as you are browsing, make some record of EVERYTHING you read, even if it’s just a print-out of your browser history at the end of the day. You never know when you’re going to want to use a tidbit that you ran across early in your research and didn’t copy because you didn’t think it was important. And I can guarantee you that when you do, it will be almost impossible to find it again! You should also capture webpages when you read them, as their content may change before you finish the book – save them on your hard drive as html or pdf so you can access them again. There are lots of different ways to keep track of all your information: I generally try to keep most things in file folders on my computer, with matching folders for anything I have only in hard copy. Notes in the spreadsheet can tell me where I’ve stashed things (and what library I borrowed any books from, in case I need to access them again!)

Of course the more in-person research you can do, the better it is for your writing. Whether you’re standing in a lab watching the process you’re going to describe or sitting in the rare books room holding a manuscript by the author you’re profiling, the chance to be there is worth a great deal of effort. There’s no substitute for having visited a person’s home when you’re trying to describe it later. But the reality of our work is that this is not always possible. I could not have afforded to go to Texas to visit the homes of the women I profiled in Women of the Lone Star State, nor to have visited the museums in Europe, Asia and Australia that preserve so much of the material I wrote about in Sport and Games. The internet has made research possible today that would have been impossible a few decades ago. We can read newspaper articles from the past three centuries, see photographs of medieval and ancient artifacts, and read the diaries of people who lived through the actual events we are researching, all without leaving our desks.

With that wealth of access has come a new crop of potential pitfalls. The ease of putting up websites and producing e-books has made it all too easy for people to present as facts their own opinions or the misguided results of other people’s research. It’s not just Wikipedia, which you should use just the way you would a printed encyclopedia – as a place to get a quick overview and to mine for references. You’ll find factoids and spin in all kinds of places.

Even a renowned expert on a subject brings to it his or her own preconceived notions and treasured conclusions. Bias is inescapable. Your challenge, as a researcher, is to vet and double-check, to bring in as many and as diverse a collection of sources as you can find; to judiciously examine and consider the credentials of the person making the statement. Just because someone has a PhD in economics doesn’t mean their opinion on climate change has any more weight than your mother’s, for example (much less weight if your mother happens to have her degree in climatology).

One way to vet information is simply to see if you can find it again in other, unrelated sources (but drill down to be sure that they are not all citing the same, possibly erroneous reference). Check and consider the dates of contradictory information: later scholarship frequently corrects earlier errors, but contemporaneous sources may be more reliable than later recollections and retellings. Another important step is to ask someone – a researcher or professor in the subject area – what the current scholastic opinion is about the purported fact. (Interviews should generally be conducted after you’ve done all the broad research and a good deal of the secondary level work, so that you have a good grasp of the subject, will understand what your expert is telling you, and will know what questions you would like to ask.)

Keep careful notes, check your sources, and organize what you find, and your research process will be both enjoyable and productive!

Poetry Friday: I Meant To Do My Work Today

I meant to do my work today,
But a brown bird sang in the apple tree,
And a butterfly flitted across the field,
And all the leaves were calling me.
And the wind went sighing over the land,
Tossing the grasses to and fro,
And a rainbow held out its shining hand,
So what could I do but laugh and go?

-- Richard LeGallienne

By the way, Carol and Jack are hosting over at their corner . . . right over here.

Women of Wednesday: The Strong

When I was a kid, I had lots of unstructured time, and I had no problem filling it to the max with all sorts of imaginative play. I don't think that happens as much as it once did. During my teaching career -- and this is just anecdotal -- I saw my students so over-committed, I wondered if they ever had time to just play. They were so busy with formal lessons and team sports and other team activities -- usually organized by parents.

As I was searching for something else, I happened upon The Strong. The Strong bills itself as an interactive, collections-based institution dedicated to the idea of Play.

Even the building looks fun:

The Strong is named for Margaret Woodbury Strong. Margaret led an amazingly privileged life:

'Thanks to her parent’s passion for traveling, Margaret saw more of the world by age 11 than many people do in a lifetime. On one six-month trip, she visited the beaches of Hawaii, played with dolls in a Japanese teahouse, rode an elephant in Ceylon, and toured the waterfronts of Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Canton. As an adult reflecting on her travels, she noted, “I was allowed to carry a small bag to put my dolls and toys in, and to add anything I acquired on the trips. Consequently, my fondness for small objects grew.” The Woodburys also spent considerable time visiting museums and attending the theater. In short, they made the world both Margaret’s classroom and her playground.

An active child, Margaret enjoyed numerous athletic endeavors and later became an accomplished bowler and golfer. She also followed the social schedule dictated by the period and class to which she belonged. A comprehensive round of teas, dinners, and dances filled her calendar, and she faithfully catalogued mementos from these occasions in scrapbooks. She also pursued photography and received tutoring in languages, history, music, and art."

Margaret was quite accomplished. She won major awards for her golf game and for flower arranging. The latter even netted her an invitation to exhibit her flower-arranging skills at the 1939 Worlds Fair.

Her real passion was, however, collecting. Margaret was keen and passionate about it as only true collectors are.

"Margaret’s collecting interests ranged so wide and her methods assumed such aggressive proportions that by the late 1960s, she had amassed more than 27,000 dolls and a seemingly endless number of middle-class American household objects spread over more than 50 categories. The vast majority of her collections, however, related in some way to play, and she earned a particular reputation for her outstanding collection of dolls and toys"

She began to think of her collection as more of a museum and added two wings that were more like galleries to her already-huge 30 room home in Rochester, NY. She thought of her home and collection as The Margaret Woodbury Strong Museum of Fascination.

Margaret died at age 72 in 1969. She left behind her collections and a financial legacy that has resulted in The Strong. The museum opened to the public in 1982, and now encompasses The National Museum of Play, The National Toy Hall of Fame, and others.

For her contribution to the world of Play, today The Write Sisters salute Margaret Woodbury Strong.

You can read more at The Strong.

Mentor Monday: Setting as Antagonist

Most of the time we think of setting as just a place to put a story. We say stories are “character-driven” while others are “plot driven.”  Can they be “setting driven?”  Maybe, if the setting is considered a character.

Stories need a protagonist and an antagonist. In Hatchet, Gary Paulsen’s first book in the Bryan Robeson series, the setting is the antagonist. Bryan and the wilderness are the main characters in the story. The plot is basic: 14-year-old stranded Bryan tries to survive. The wilderness tries to kill him.

A story cannot proceed without a well-developed hero and villain, neither can it proceed without a well-developed setting. In a recent post we experimented with changing the setting of stories and found that the change impacted the characters as well as the story’s trajectory.

Some time ago, we also discussed some of the basic plots in literature and how they can be divided into seven concepts:

Man vs. nature
Man vs. man
Man vs. the environment
Man vs. machines/technology
Man vs. the supernatural
Man vs. self
Man vs. god/religion 

Setting helps writers turn these 7 concepts into innumerable stories. Hatchet, for example, is a man vs. nature tale. It is a contemporary story of a boy who is lost in the wilderness when the pilot of a small bush plane, in which Bryan is a passenger, has a heart attack mid-flight. The plane crashes and Bryan survives to face the harsh Canadian forest.

Take another 14-year-old boy and put him in a forest in the early 1300s. He is left alone for a month or more. If he survives, he becomes a man in the eyes of his clan.

Take a third teen and put him in post-apocalyptic Europe in the year 2499. He awakens to find that he is alone in the destroyed ruins of a once-thriving city.

All of these situations mimic the Hatchet story but the setting changes the type of character that will be developed in each man vs. nature scenario. The threats and the survival possibilities will be different. The protagonists’ inner knowledge will be different. Bryan Robeson has his hatchet. Such a weapon might not exist for the 14^th century boy. The 25^th century boy might find weapons that have not yet been invented in our time.

Your unique setting also will impact your plot and the outcome of your story. In each of the scenarios above, the author’s background knowledge will be different, too. Gary Paulsen’s character, Bryan, needed to survive using real, modern-day and believable skills. 

The 14^th century native teen, left alone to prove he is a man, would have some similar threats that Bryan faced (such as wild beasts, cold, etc.) but with different limitations. While he might be better at creating shelter for himself than a 20^th century teen, he might have weapons that are less dependable such as an ax he made himself that wouldn’t cut as well as the machine-made model available to Bryan. The author would have to do a different kind of research than that done by Gary Paulsen: what kind of wood and stone would be available to his character in that particular part of the world at that particular time in history?

The protagonist teen in the post-apocalyptic novel would be limited only by the author’s imagination.  “Nature” might have an entirely different definition in this particular world. In these stories, set in a future time, the author makes the rules.

Continue to read great authors for children and pay attention to the setting of their stories. Notice the authors’ methods of description and how the sense of place impacts each work you read. Not all settings will be used as an antagonist but can the setting be considered even a minor character?  We’ll talk about that in a future post. 

Poetry Friday

Forget about the lawn mower and the shopping list.  Forget about the laundry and the dishes.  You're not getting any younger and neither is the day.  Get out and enjoy it!

Today

So here has been dawning

another blue day;

Think, wilt thou let it

slip useless away.

Out of Eternity

the new day was born;

Into Eternity

at night, will return.

Behold it aforetime

no eye ever did;

So soon it forever

from all eyes is hid.

Here has been dawning

another blue day;

Think, wilt thou let it

slip useless away.

Thomas Carlyle

Linda, at Teacherdance is hosting today's Poetry Friday.

Go on over and say 'hello' and then read her goodbye poetry.