How much research is necessary?

It seems that recently, whenever I see a work that didn't do its research on anything that is remotely plot or setting related. Using something like a philosophy, a field of science, real life events, and religion (fuck you, Anime Catholicism), really annoys me and saying "It's just fiction you should just relax" is an easy way to make me go berserk.

Look, I know that the story comes first but people using things that they don't know anything about in their story really annoyes me. Want to make a Nietsche Wannabe? Fine, just make sure you actually read some of his books or at least his Wikipedia page. You want to invoke Messiah imagery with him? Sure, why not, but you better not turn him/her into an Anti-Hero it just does not work that way.

Sorry for the venting. By the way, does reading a subject's Wikipedia article thoroughly count as right amount of research?

It depends on how much effort you want to put into it and whether it helps in the story in any way.

If you love the subject, then by all means study extensively on it. If you don't, then why did you put it in there in the first place?

I don't, really. It's just that there are so many things I find cool, like military helicopters, Christianity, psychology, martial arts, that it slows down my work.

Still, it seems that not everyone cares about research as much as I do...I'm obsessed with research really, only because it helps the setting feel more realistic and more realistic it is, more it helps my illusion that it might happen in RL...

edited 8th Jul '11 6:59:19 PM by dRoy

The Sliding Scale of Research Necessity:

1. MST3K Mantra: The story is meant to be fun, sensual, or scary by any means necessary. This means blatantly ignoring realism or logic, then so be it.

2. Audience Connection: You want to be realistic so long as your audience can connect with the characters, setting or events. Even though the story takes place on Mars in an alternate 1949, you draw enough comparisons to real-life circumstances to make them feel there. From there, you can pretty much do whatever you want, but you need to keep that empathetic grounding.

3. Author Tract: Your story is meant to be a commentary on real-life circumstances, such as human trafficking in Africa. Thus, you need to have enough research to be able to make your point with factual evidence to back it up. Nothing pisses people off more than a pretentious author falling back on The War on Straw.

4. Author Expertise: You want to write a story which enlightens people about a certain field or expounds upon new possibilities (such as Asimov's work with artificial intelligence). You learn everything you possibly can about the subject in question and craft the entirety of your story around actual plausible scenarios backed up by real world science. Sure, some of this may be disproved later on by Science Marches On, but at the time, your theory was sound.

Sometimes research is unnecessary.

I feel like generally if you're going to bring something up, you should at least know enough to not be completely wrong. But, I personally like the research part so I get a bit enthusiastic about it.

Which leads to me trying to figure out if the pathogen causing a magical plague would be more like a virus or a bacteria, by taking out a bunch of books on microbiology and epidemiology. And taking out books on linguistics because I want to create a vaguely functional language instead of random gibberish. It can be done, right?

So, yeah, Wikipedia articles are a good start and maybe reading the sources they're derived from.

Actually, I find that to be the best kind of writing. In fact, the kind of fiction that I enjoy and respect the most is one written by prefessionals of some sort, like a lawyer or a professor, and based on the knowledge that s/he spent many years studying.

That's why I actually wanted to be a doctor or get a major in psychology, especially psychophysiology or psychoanalysis but since I fail at math...it just can't be done. I'll just have to settle with English Literature then. That and my father is a Bible buff and mom is a pharmacist of sort so maybe I can get some help from them from time to time.

Sorry for the digression.

I love doing research; it's my favorite part of writing, even though I'm working with the Urban and High Fantasy genres. Science, history, and linguistics (for Con Langs, of course) are my favorite topics.

I've found that I generally include things in my works that relate directly to whatever we happen to be studying in school at the moment. When we were learning chemistry in physics class, I realized that that's how my Reality Warper rolls- he can manipulate things on the molecular level. We're currently learning about the Articles of Confederation, and it sounds like the kind of thing my naive empress would write up. And so on.

That's a good idea, asking people you know to consult for your work. I have a family full of doctors, my mom's an art teacher, my dad knows a lot about history, one of my uncles is an architect...but I can't find anyone that can tell me about Memphis.

Why does the last bit sounds like Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking...?

Because I doubt there's a lot of people who study Memphis for a living. Especially around her in the Mid-west.

Yeah I know that, but it just sounds a bit odd after art, history, and whatnots.

If it's important plot or character-wise, it's best to research how it's done. Example: I decided that two of my characters are amateur boxers (one is semi-pro at this point, but I digress). I went to That Other Wiki and read up on boxing, so I could pin down what styles they used and could call the different punches by their proper names.

Granted, a lot of what I read won't play any major part in the narrative.

I always thought that research should be exactly proportional to how seriously one expects a work to be taken. If I write, say, Innocence Lost, I'll literally sit down and research every nook and cranny of European, American, and Asian history from 1600 to 1918, as well as nuclear physics and whatnot, because, well, it's Alternate History Steampunk World War One.

Conversely, if I want to write a parody of, say, a pirate story, then the research simply isn't going to matter. If it looks like a pirate and talks like a pirate, it's good enough for the story.

So, really, the entire question is subjective. Some authors don't care about the work. Money, Dear Boy is a trope of its own, after all. Others care but don't know all the things that should come as implications for what they're writing. That's why we have Fridge Logic and Write What You Know. Others slave away on a piece of fiction for years so that it can be as awesome as it is in their head. Those people tend to disappear into their computer rooms for weeks at a time, get nothing done, and end up with nothing good before giving up entirely on whatever it was that they were working on. In short, it depends.

I do a lot of research as I strongly feel that the more you know on a topic, the more confidently you can write about it and I feel that confidence shows in your writing even if you don't pepper it with minutiae and lengthy discourses on the topic.

You use the right terms, you phrase sentences based on an understanding of the topic at hand, you don't make silly mistakes or wrong assumptions and you're so immersed in the world you've researched you draw the reader in.

That said, I tailor the amount of research into a topic based on how important it is to the story. In my current work, sustainable living is extremely important, so I'm doing a lot of research into that. Steel shipping containers also feature but I only did enough research on them to find out the basic facts I needed for the story.

Maybe you can do a cursory research using wikipedia and all the links that lead from it and 'gloss over' certain parts that you can't find about. Basically avoid describing in too much detail.

May not be a good example, but I also have this problem with my story that's set in what is practically the standard fantasy rpg setting. I skip describing toilets.