I get that even if you’re writing about a piece fiction that takes place in a real city, it’s a good idea to do your research.
But what if it’s a completely fictional place made up in your head? Even that would need research. Because there are going to be some in your story that are grounded in reality.
Anyway just curious: you feel like research is an absolute must?
Are there any authors out there that hammered out a successful novel all from his or her basement? Lol
I can do a lot of research from my basement…
I think it pretty obviously depends on what the novel is about and how the author’s own knowledge and experience is relevant to it. So sometimes absolutely yes, sometimes no, or very little.
Another point I’d make is that extensive research may sometimes be necessary but doesn’t necessarily make for a good novel. Arthur Hailey made a name for himself as a writer who did meticulous research on the subjects of his industry-focused fiction, like about the airline or automotive industry. His novels, generally speaking, were factually accurate and were also literary crap and formulaic, even though they were mostly best-sellers.
A good rule of thumb is that anything you write is going to be ruthlessly picked apart by readers who are better experts in the field than you are. So even if it’s a total fictional place, it should still get things right. Such as the human body details, or math, etc. that shares things in common with the real world.
Yep. For fantasy novels there’s a thing called “world building”. Sit down and outline how your planet works, how your society works, how the "human"s’ motivations work. Spend a lot of time debugging that so it’s complete and internally consistent.
Then, and only then, try to write stories that take place in your world.
It’s sort of like inventing a board game. Get the game board and game play process figured out first, before you try to have your imaginary people play it.
Yes, it’ll be an iterative process at least partially as in the course of writing out your players playing in your world, you’ll notice world areas that need more completeness or work not so well. So tweak those and keep going.
If it turns out your world is a success, the better job you did before the first smash novel, the less embarrassingly bad retconning you’ll have to patch in later.
I’m going to push back on this as prescriptive advice for writing a fantasy novel. Writers have been roughly divided between planners and pantsers, people who are meticulous in their preparation and then… people like me, who just jump in and keep writing shit until it congeals into a story. People who write fantasy novels are generally thought to be in the former category, such that a lot of advice is around “world-building.” But I, a “discovery writer” to my core, recently finished a fantasy novel, and I have two more half-written, and conceptually they were pretty much entirely pantsed.
I find planning for novels incredibly tedious. I’d rather read end user license agreements than plan out a novel. It kills all joy. Despite, this, I’ve tried - it never works. For my recently completed novel, Killer, I wrote a story, and created fantastic elements to serve the story, and once I had the story, I fleshed out the world around it. The whole thing built itself as I wrote, and more as I revised.
The process was like this: “Hey, it would be cool if a man and woman met in the woods and started fighting. Okay. Why are they fighting? She thinks he’s a revolutionary. Is he a revolutionary? No, he’s the brother of the revolution’s founder and he wants fuck-all to do with the revolution. He just wants to get his brother out of political prison. Oh, but his brother is her mentor because she’s a secret revolutionary…” And it just happens. You just start writing and it just happens.
Despite my complete lack of planning, I’ve never had a single person complain about my world building. The goal is verisimilitude. Does this world feel coherent? That’s all that matters.
There is a danger for people who like to plan, in that sometimes they just plan endlessly and never actually start the book. Or they write their books with long-winded descriptions of all their research and planning regardless of actual relevance to the story. This is why I find a lot of fantasy difficult to read. It’s like the writer fell in love with the world and not the people populating the world, and their books are a love letter to a place rather than people. Broad generalizations here, and perhaps misinformed, because I haven’t read a lot of fantasy. (I’m excluding science fiction in this case, which is my favorite genre, but I’m not here to quibble about the differences between fantasy and science fiction.)
There are downsides to pantsing too… endless revisions. But I don’t care, because I love editing.
As for research… that is again based on the needs of the story. I do it sparingly, specifically, with laser-like focus.
I had to write from the perspective of a political prisoner in book two. I read a lot about the Texas penal system and Guantanamo Bay. I needed to understand the types of experiences he would have in such a prison, including sexual assault. Now I need to do additional research about how sexual assault affects men differently than women. Then I have to think about his specific made-up culture and how that would influence his response. Not easy reading but certainly not tedious.
I did some basic medical research as I have a supporting character who is a doctor. I’m going to have to do a lot more research before I write a book from his POV, oof.
Sometimes you just gotta do it.
I paid a lot of attention to culture in my book, among different fantasy races and nationalities, but I did not base my book on any particular existing culture, I just pantsed the fuck out of it. I did recently look at what different cultures throughout the world did with scarves, because I had a scene about scarf-dancing, but when I say I “did research” I mean I watched three YouTube videos of people dancing with scarves. I didn’t crib from any of them, but it did generate an idea.
I also did research about how to disarm someone with a knife, and I did a good job with that because my Marine friend approved. Unfortunately I had to cut that whole sequence.
The only thing I will say is if your book has magic, you will at some point have to figure the rules of your magic system out and adhere to those rules meticulously. But my books don’t have magic. And even if they did, I’d write the story first, and then figure out what magic system would best support the story I know I want to tell. The most important thing is to be consistent.
You are far more expert than I. I defer to your experience and expertise.
As you say at the end
How any author gets there is up to them.
I’m just saying, I think it’s the generally given advice to be careful in your world-building because people who write fantasy love world-building.
And you should be careful in your world-building… it just doesn’t necessarily have to be done in advance. (Unless you are doing it for a D&D campaign. You really need to know everything about everything to pull something like that off.)
I knew an editor/writer of post-apoc who got the world-building question all the time. And his advice was always, “Man, just focus on the story. The rest will sort itself out.”
This idea of verisimilitude also works with characters. You don’t need to know every detail of your character’s life history or their favorite cereal or whatever. You just need to figure out the demands of the story, and meet them.
ETA: And I’m hardly an expert. I’m just proof you don’t have to plan ahead.
That sounds a lot like planning.
Well, here’s the thing. Some people get that creative high when they’re writing their outline. Others get it while we’re working on the draft. And I think we both get a similar kick out of doing it our respective ways. It’s fascinating (and wonderful) to me how much writers’ processes can differ. Even among pantsers we don’t all do it the same way. Outliners all have different processes that work for them. Yet we’re all somehow magically enthralled with the whole process.
There’s a great little book called The Courage to Write which talks about, among other things, famous people and their different methodologies… it’s all different. Idiosyncratic. Yet somehow we all get to the same place: the end of a story.
….Ouch!
It’s all personal preference, really. I was feeling a bit defensive.
I have a short attention span for like, deep world-building. But not every fantasy book is that. For example, our very own Reality Chuck wrote a fantasy book, Cadaver Princess, and I loved it.
No, you put your finger on my problem. I’ve been planning forever. I’ve got maybe 700 pages of planning. And still only a bit of half-baked actual prose.
It could be fear. That fear of not delivering on the ideal can really be paralyzing. It took me 10+ years to finish my first book not because of world-building, but because of that fear. Like oh god, what if I do my best and it’s not good enough? If I could just work on it a little bit longer, then I’ll be ready. We all play these games with ourselves in some ways.
Here’s a notion inspired by another recurring thread on this board that maybe should be spun off into a separate thread : “What is the first sentence of the book you are currently WRITING?”
I love it!
Yup, I didn’t want to get into “my book is published but if only I could go back and tweak and edit this and that” syndrome. And also because I was writing about current events, half of my intended-story became constantly outdated. The fall of Assad changed how I had to write about Syria. Trump got reelected, Covid came, ISIS fell, Russia invaded Ukraine, AI become a big thing - all of that made me have to revise endlessly. Eventually I realized I needed to just plow ahead and ignore world events.
I don’t think research is always necessary, but a glaring lack of research can ruin a good story for a lot of readers.
There’s plenty of things you need to research even if you’re creating a pure fantasy world.
Do people ride horses (or the equivalent)? Then you need to look into how the saddles work, what they might eat, etc.
Weapons? How do they work? What are the pros and cons of various metals?
Are they traveling by boat? What sort of sails do they use? What are their provisions?
I’m a pure pantser and get bogged down if I try to plan anything out, but I’m constantly checking things I write to make it right. I’ve been writing historical fantasy lately, but when I wrote a traditional high fantasy novel, there were many things I had to look up.
Even if you don’t use everything you look up, it will improve your novel by just looking it up.