Terry Shames here:
The question this week is how you decide how much of your
background research you put into your books. I write a series set in Texas and my
basic research was done when I was a child. The town of Jarrett Creek is based
on the town where my grandparents lived when I was growing up. The smell,
sights, sounds, even the taste are part of my cell structure. That part of
Texas can be bone-dry one minute, so that the smell of dust permeates
everything, and then it can be drenched with rain for days on end, bringing
with it the scent of swampland—earthy and rich. A railroad track runs through
town, as does a main state highway, bisecting the town and lending reality to
the term “the other side of the tracks.” But in this case, both sides are “the
other side.” When I was growing up the Santa Fe railroad came through town. A
train whistle and the sound of the great wheels churning down the tracks throws
me into the memory of how that sound made me restless and lonesome all at the
same time. I dreamed of being the first female hobo, hopping the train for
parts unknown. As for the taste, the land around Somerville is full of clay and
the water tastes of iron. You can’t find that kind of research on the internet.
This series full yembraces the concept “write what you know.” I know this town.
But I do have research to do. Early on, since I was going to
be writing about a police chief, I needed to know the details of police
departments in small towns in Texas—the personnel, the buildings, the jurisdictions,
their uniforms, their vehicles. And I needed to know about guns. That’s a
particularly fraught subject, because gun-lovers are alert to anything you get
wrong, and gun-haters don’t want to hear about it. Combining the two made it
easy—be specific, but don’t dwell on it. I read thrillers in which every single
detail of a protagonist’s weapon(s) is given in detail. I suppose some thriller
readers care, but I don’t. I want to say to the writer, “Good for you! You did your
research, and it shows. Too much.”
But there are other things I include in books that I don’t
know so much about. A chief of police in a small town in Texas encounters all
kinds of mayhem that I have to know something about. Here’s my secret: I don’t
do advance research. I write scenes the way I think they would actually happen—and
then I look up the reality. I have read too many books where it was obvious
that the writer had done a lot of research and either was determined not to
have it go to waste or didn’t know when they gone too far in writing it, so
that it became cumbersome to read. When I write it the way I “think” it should
be, I concentrate on what my protagonist is experiencing.
Here’s an example: In An
Unsettling Crime for Samuel Craddock, a prequel set in the early 1980s,
Samuel is a newly minted chief of police. He goes to Austin to view an autopsy
of burn victims. I thought I ought to read a little something about how that
would be done. It turned out not to be necessary. I went on-line and
immediately saw a photo of a burn victim on an autopsy table. That’s all I
needed. My imagination did the rest—the sight, the sound, the smell—all through
Samuel Craddock’s eyes as a young man determined to get through the autopsy
without disgracing himself. After the book was published someone asked me how I
got the autopsy so accurate. My husband is a retired physician and I asked him
if he noticed anything amiss in the autopsy scene. He looked at me in amazement
and said it never occurred to him that I had never attended an autopsy—especially
of a burn victim. It seemed totally authentic to him. Anybody who watches crime
on TV has seen little bits of autopsies, but I focused on the things that
someone would focus on who had never attended one.
Sometimes, I do waste writing time when I don’t research in
advance. After I wrote the autopsy chapter, I went back to make sure the
details of the place it was done were accurate—and discovered that the current
building where autopsies are done in Austin is not the one where they were done
in the 1980’s. I had to rewrite those descriptions. Another glitch was
discovered by my copyeditor (bless her!). I had included the name of an economy
motel chain, and she discovered that that motel chain did not have a presence
in Texas until the late 1980’s.
Not only is accuracy important to me for my own
satisfaction, but people will write you about things you get wrong—or that they
think you get wrong. One man wrote to tell me that alfalfa is not actually
grown in Texas. I know darned good and well that it is. But who am I to argue
with a Texan? I told him that I must have been mistaken and that my daddy
called any field of fodder “alfalfa.” Another man wrote to tell me that police
chiefs are not appointed by sheriffs in Texas. Thank goodness I had actually done
my research early on, and found that in some small towns that is exactly the
way it’s done.
I guess my bottom line answer to the question is, I do only
the research I need to do, and I only put in what needs to be there.
