Haphazard

Photo by Breanna Galley
image courtesy of unsplash.com

As much as I enjoy imagining following the footsteps of Mr. Lucas, Professor Lewis, or Professor Tolkien one day, and contributing something that straddles the line between genre and actual lit, if I had to say there was one piece of writing advice that’s taken something I’m writing to places I hadn’t expected and was thankful to have been to, it’s the obvious old chestnut “write what you know.”

Research, eh?  Sounds like a tall order.

But it’s where most of my past essays and remarks have fallen somewhat short, and where I think a lot of my work finds its limit -- most of the time my writing is confined to “maybe it’s X” or “maybe it’s Y” and arguing between the two out of whole cloth.  

It’s not a bad occupation for leisure time, but it doesn’t get us very far if we really wanted to figure something out -- sooner or later I start bringing in quotes from old movies, or ideas from other people’s work, something to give my ideas some kind of ground to figure against.

And that’s not a bad thing either, I like writing that takes different ideas and crams them together to try and reveal something not the same as either -- but the problem is that it’s too easy.

There are no stakes when it’s just you walking around inside your own head -- maybe ‘stakes’ is the wrong word, maybe ‘consequences’ is closer -- there’s a sense that you can get away with anything, there’s nothing to bring the content down to reality.

Especially when the only outside content one can haul in, often completely by head and shoulders, is just more fiction.

In Heinlein’s The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress (god damn it), the narrator remarks that Mike, a enormous, essentially immobile, sentient and friendly computer with many eyes who can (and probably has) read everything ever written in almost no time, gets something out of stories he can’t get anywhere else.

“I used to question Mike’s endless reading of fiction, wondering what notions he was getting.  But turned out he got a better feeling for human life from stories than he had been able to garner from facts; fiction gave him a gestalt of life, one taken for granted by a human; he lives it.”  (Heinlein, 1966)

In Mike’s mind, the flavor of life and the inherent pressures of conscious experience were lacking because of who he was and where he came from, what he knew and what he was able to learn on his own through self-inspection and reflection.

I may or may not have mentioned before that I was a philosophy student once, which means I was however briefly heir to a number of thinkers who could probably be justifiably described as long on thinky-talky, short on specifics.

So endless speculation and armchair long-windedness come naturally to my disposition, apparently; I need more research in this blog because I can free write all I want, but it’s tough to say whether anything that’ll get written will be actually useful for anything.

Plus original research is where good ideas come from.

I’m not saying you go out and steal whatever sounds good when you encounter it, turn it around and make it into a story (though you can do that, knock yourself out, you can say whatever you want if you’re not planning on selling it, or even publishing it).

Sure you can get some ideas from thinking over what you’ve already read and experienced (for me a lot of classic fiction and genre fiction, a liberal education, a lot more contemporary popular film, some scattered nonfiction books on tape here and there, and tons and tons of repetition on top of everything), but there will hardly ever be any real surprises, and whatever you come up with will probably feel a little forced, and probably a little vague.

So what then, how do I start researching, what do I even want to do research about?