#52: How I Research a Novel, in the Stacks and in the World

Hello friends,

Later this week, I’m leaving on a month-long trip to Europe, spending two weeks or so trekking solo on a pilgrimage in Spain before meeting my partner in Geneva to travel on to the Alps to hike the Tour du Mont Blanc. The solo phase of the trip is mostly novel research and the second mostly vacation but I expect some useful overlap across the two adventures, in part because so much of what I’m writing about these days (across multiple projects) concerns long-distance overland travel in one way or another. If all goes well, I’ll cover three hundred-plus miles on foot across four countries in thirty days, and I hope the experiences I have along the way will be useful when I get back to the desk.

For me, getting to conduct research both in-person and in libraries and other archives is one of the best reasons to be a writer. I’ve always wanted to tell stories, but I’ve also come to consider novel writing my preferred form of inquiry, a mode of exploring not just my place in the world but also history, science, ethics, and other areas of thought. I’m not really a trained scholar but writing novels allow me to moonlight as one for a while, dipping in and out of dozens of disciplines and subject areas over the course of writing a book. More often than not, this research is a delight, allowing me to chase old obsessions and develop new ones.

Ideally, following such obsessions eventually results in a finished novel or story, but sometimes the research remains enjoyable or useful even after the related project fails. About ten years ago, I spent a year and a half writing and researching a novel that I ultimately put aside not because the novel wasn’t working but because the research convinced me I was so out of my depths that there probably wasn’t an ethical way to write the book I’d intended. (At least not for me, at that time.) But that research changed my worldview on certain topics forever, and so I treasure that “failure” too.

Obviously there’s no one right way to do research, and different projects can demand wildly different amounts of investigation. But almost everything I write these days requires at least some, and I imagine almost any story or novel can benefit from it, even if it begins ...