Pens Fatales

by Sophie

RESEARCH


Here's just one of my dirty little secrets - but it's a big one:

I hate doing research.

Oh, I don't have any objection to learning, as long as I can do it my own way (which is to say, solitarily, in a circuitous fashion, stumbling onto facts like pretty shells on a beach). I was terrible in the classroom. I don't have much luck with reading lists or bibliographies or course outlines. I can't stay on track for anything.

But if, instead of thinking of learning as a point-A-to-point-B exercise, wherein a specific question is put to rest by a focused search for information, you consider it as a lovely amorphous cloud, I'm all in.

Oh, would that all learning could look like this!!



"Reading room" - surely that has to be one of the most delightful phrases in the language. A place you can go, and - and - and just sort of glom about, soaking up bits of this and that. Gorgeous leather-bound dictionaries on stands. Hoary old thesauruses and collected works and compendiums listing on dusty shelves. Rows and rows and rows of volumes in the stacks, each one a little world unto itself, a peek into the mind of some like-minded book person.

Because everyone here is a book person. Right? or they wouldn't be here.

(So NOT like today's libraries. I'm digressing, but... They built a zillion dollar library up the road across from the new middle school. And this is in a neighborhood of well-heeled folks, my friends. People who don't have to send their kids wandering over there after school for a little free babysitting. Try to work on your novel there - just try - while hundreds of texting, chattering kids carom through the place sticking gum under the tables and making out and eating Dip'n'Stix and basically anything but reading.

And I'm a person who actually adores teenagers!)

Wait wait, back to the subject. The reading rooms of yore are, sadly, mostly of yore. They're an anachronism, ill-wired for digital mod cons, their soaring ceilings bringing unsupportably high heat bills, their mullioned windows and carved balustrades and intimate galleries merely souvenirs from another, quainter time. Any coffee shop with free wifi is, to many, a more hospitable environment, one in which one's pinging iPhone and headphones are welcome and stray intelligentsia are not, so much.

And of course a preponderance of research can be done online. Not all, or so I hear, though you couldn't prove it by my oeuvre. A guideline I've adopted, somewhat defensively, for recent books might be summarized as: "If you can't google it, readers won't really care."

(I might point out that the book before the one that sold - book number eight, for anyone who is counting - marked a yeoman's - yeowoman's? - effort on my part to get the facts straight. Actual research, of the phone-calling, appointment making, site-visiting sort was done, along with the usual interweb claptrap. Verdict: no takers.)

Some of my friends adore research. (I'm sure you'll hear from them shortly, right here at PF.) Some of my family members have built entire careers around it. I remain uncharmed and resistant.

Recently, I made a happy discovery - by a mere shift of genre, one can land oneself in a place where research is not only not required but might actually get in the way. It's called worldbuilding, and it's the domain of those who write scifi and historical and horror and a variety of other things where the only fact-checking to be done is in one's own imagination.