Fact-finding missions, an open book blog hop post

 

 

Welcome to Open Book Blog Hop. You can find us every Monday talking about the writing life. I hope you'll check out all the posts: you'll find the links at the bottom of this post.

How do you find the facts that inform your work?
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You end up needing to know a lot of strange little things when you're writing a book. Sure, you're making things up, but your story still needs grounding in reality, especially if your work is set in a realistic or near-realistic setting. 

For my Menopausal Superheroes series, there's obviously a lot of "hand-wave-ium" about the science of how things are possible. Jessica "Flygirl" Roark can fly and there's some exploration as to how and why, but I'm not trying to make this impossible thing realistic, so I was free to be playful and imaginative in making that part up. 

Still, I did research about buoyancy and flight, trying to decide if I'd pull more from bird, balloon, or machine in my decision-making about how Jessica's flight works. I enjoy that reading, finding facts to extrapolate from and play with. In fact, I enjoy research so much, that if I'm not careful, I can fall down a research rabbit hole and get distracted from actually writing my story. 

For many things, I pull from my own experience and from stories I've heard all my life from other people. I know what it feels like (at least from my own experience) to fall in love, to be ill, to become frustrated, etc. So, I can use my own experiences and what I've observed as a baseline.

image source

 

On the other hand, I don't know what it feels like to be shot by a gun (and I hope I never find out), so when Leonel "Fuerte" Álvarez took a bullet wound in Book 2, Change of Life, I did a lot of reading and asking questions in online groups about the medical aspects of that, making sure he was shot in a way that he could recover from, and that his recovery could be reasonably realistic. 

For some of my other work, I've needed historical details of dress and legal status, so I read nonfiction books, look details up online (always corroborating with more than one source because the Internet lies), and ask questions of experts. I'm in a couple of Facebook groups where writers can ask lawyers and doctors legal and medical questions and that's SUPER useful as those kinds of things come up in fiction all the time. 

Those little details add veracity to a story and make it easy for the reader to stay engaged in a story, so they really do matter. I know I've been frustrated by books I've read that got details wrong that conflict with own knowledge and experience. If there's enough of them, I stop reading. So, I try not to do that to my own readers. 

How about you? What do you do to make your own work feel real? Where do you learn what you need to know? What kinds of details throw you out of a story you're reading? I'd love to hear about it in the comments!

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