03 January 2022

Look It Up


 by Steve Liskow


Last week, Barb Goffman discussed details that make or break your work, and many people chimed in with stories or authors that had lost them by making a careless--and avoidable--mistake.

With the Internet, billions of bits of information are only a click away. That's both good and bad, especially for someone like me. I'm a trivia junkie and even as my memory fades, I can bring up details no healthy person would know, usually about music. I often use music in my stories because I already  have enough context so I can write a story and know exacty what I still need to check or verify. Usually.


Several years ago, I wrote "Hot Sugar Blues" about a folk and blues singer who became popular when he turned to rock and roll. I based him on Bob Dylan, John Sebastian, The Blues Project, and several other real artists, and I had him mention the Cafe Au Go-Go in Greenwich Village. The anthology editor, whose job was to verify such details, said the venue didn't feature live bands until later that year. 

Oops. My knowledge fell short. Fortunately, the date wasn't crucial for the story, so we became less specific. 

I can do research, but I prefer not to for a short story because it feels like more effort than it's worth for a few thousand words. Old school research--books and magazines--wasn't a problem because wandering off on a tangent took more effort.


But when you're online, it's easy to open a link, then another one and another one until the top of your monitor looks like a string of beads. I can be waist-deep in irrelevant trivia that has nothing to do with my original quest, and two hours have passed. 

Novels, of course, are different because they demand more information. 

Lately, though, I've found myself writing stories for specific times or places that fall outside my usual turf. That's good because it's expanding my repertoire, but it means yes, I do need to do research. Sometimes, it's amazing what you already have at hand that you didn't think about. 

This spring, one of my stories will appear in Groovy Gumshoes, a collection of PI stories set in the Sixties, edited by Michael Bracken. The guidelines recommended using an historical event from that period, and I happened to take summer classes at Oakland University in 1967. The college is thirty miles north of Detroit, and two of my dorm mates watched their homes burn in the television coverage of the West Side Riot. My roommate at the time is now a Motor City attorney, and I asked him to email me a few photographs. I also have a street map of Detroit, and a lot of music from that era: The Stooges, the MC5, the SRC, Motown...

I'm doing research for two other stories, too, and I already know enough so I can recognize the specific gaps in my background. My parents loved to dance, and they loved the music of the  20s through the 50s. My mother had dozens of remastered compact discs of that music, and I've used them in plays I directed and now I know the major hits of the years in question. They give me a context for a story set during Prohibition. 

The other story may not happen, but I think it will involve a Mark Twain artifact somehow. My wife conducts tours at the Mark Twain House in Hartford and everyone there is a trivia junkie and Twain nerd. I'm creating a list of questions, and the answers will determine how--or maybe if--that story develops.

The only novel that took as much research was The Whammer Jammers, my first roller derby book. I only knew what I remembered from television back in my deformative years, nothing about the modern sport. Fortunately, my daughter was Hazel Smut Crunch # Bake 350, captain of the Queen City Cherry Bombs, and she helped me create a questionaire I sent to skaters, coaches, referees, and promotors. Everyone knew "Haze" because she also wrote the grant for the non-profit league. And one of my former theater buds knew two local skaters, so I got comped into events in New Haven and set up a few interviews. 


Having friends in high places makes the job a lot easier.

The hardest part of research isn't getting the answers. It figuring out the right questions.

8 comments:

  1. Research can be fun and I find it is easy to get sidetracked into interesting byways.

    I enjoyed your recent story in BCMM- you write well about adolescents!

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  2. Thank you, Janice. I worked with a lot of kids with special needs in the classroom, and the trust they put in me was one of the things I loved most about teaching.

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  3. Steve, one thing I found out while writing my Golden Triangle series in SE Asia and using my Chinese neighbor (an historian on China) to help with research was that the Chinese version of some events was not always the same as the English version of the same event, which made for some interesting writing.

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  4. cj Sez: West side Detroit riots brings back a memory: My (now ex) husband was an East Detroit (separate suburban city) firefighter, and he spent several nights sleeping under armed guard in a fenced-in school yard enclosure. Motown almost burned down that year. And I still have to do diligent research when I make any writing inferences to that period even though I lived through it. Good piece on research, Steve. Thanks.

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  5. Your last line is terrific, Steve! I found that out myself, when writing my latest book, which takes place in the 1920s aboard an ocean liner. One question led to another - things I never even thought to research crept up as I looked into more and more. Like...when did they move from coal to bunker oil? Gah - it was endless, the research, but also interesting and rewarding.

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  6. Great post, Steve - I too can go down a rabbit hole of research, but I figure if I can come up with that one thing that will ring true, it's worth it.

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  7. Well said, Steve -- you are completely right, I often find I need to know enough just to ask the right questions!

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  8. "The hardest part of research isn't getting the answers. It's figuring out the right questions."

    Having done a lot of research--not for writing fiction, but academic research in economics, I am 100% behind this. It is absolutely correct.

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