Doing research

One of the most important things to remember as a journalist or writer is that you must write what you know. Doing otherwise can only hurt your credibility.

What does that mean as a writer of fiction?

Does that mean, for example, if you want to write a murder mystery you have to murder someone or to have investigated a murder? What a stupid question. Of course not. If a writer had to have intimate experience in the subject area in which he or she were writing there wouldn’t be any science fiction. What person do you know who has traveled to a galaxy far, far away?

What it means is that the subject must be an area of intense interest and knowledge to the writer.

For example, I love spy novels. I have tons of them. Although I am not as knowledgeable as when I was still in college, I have an interest in espionage. I read newspaper and foreign policy journal articles on intelligence and espionage. So, it was a natural that my first novel, “Fighting Chaos,” was a spy novel. It was inspired by something that happened to me while on a trip to Spain and then I just let my imagination run wild.

I could never write a western, for example, or a romance novel because neither is an interest to me. I couldn’t write a credible tale in either genre because I have no knowledge in those areas.

What does any of this mean for research? Knowing your subject means there is less research to do but it doesn’t eliminate the need for research. Just the opposite. But it does mean that if there is something you don’t know, you can make it up and feel confident that it is still credible as long as it is within your general knowledge of the subject.

For example, I have been to the White House before but never in the Oval Office. Not even close, for that matter. But I have seen a full-sized replica of the Oval Office in the Ford Museum in Grand Rapids and have seen countless pictures of the Oval Office in books and newspaper and magazine articles, as well on in film. So I feel confident that the brief description I use in my book is accurate enough to be credible.

I didn’t make up everything in my book, of course. For research, I used books and other printed material, as well as the Internet and a hand full of people to fill in the gaps. But for the most part, I used what I already knew about people, locations and situations. And I generally used places I have already been, whether in the United States or Europe.

For example, the house that my hero lives in in Virginia was the house where a friend lived in the 1980s. I used restaurants where I had eaten, streets I had traveled, locations I had visited.

So my advice is write what you know, make up what you don’t know as long as it fits within your general knowledge and do your research. And that, I think, should make for a compelling and credible work.

Have a Happy New Year.

Thanks for reading and keep writing.