When an idea comes to you, for a novel, a play or a screenplay, how do you take it from its embryo state to a place where you are ready to let it stand as a work on its own? How can you find out enough about your idea so you can feel confident about using it in your writing? Gabriel García Márquez, when speaking about The Autumn of the Patriarch, said that he spent ten years reading about dictators, and then forgot everything he had read while he was writing his novel. Do all writers do their research beforehand, before they begin writing? To answer these questions I spoke with some novelists and screenwriters about their ways of working. What I wanted to discover was a set of guidelines emerging from my conversations with experienced writers, guidelines to keep in mind which will help you as you begin to investigate the material for your own work, whether it’s a novel or a script. Here is what I found out.
Harriet Grace
Harriet Grace is a novelist and poet whose first novel is at present with an agent. So she has reached the first stage: an agent has taken it on, but it hasn’t yet found a publisher. Her novel revolves around the theme of fertility. Written in three voices, we hear the story from the points of view of Martha, a features editor on an English national newspaper, her husband, a psychoanalyst, and also a messenger on the features floor, an attractive young man who doesn’t seem able to find his direction in life.
The first thing Harriet Grace needed to research was how the features department on a newspaper works, so she contacted the Guardian and spoke to the personal assistant to the features editor there. The PA talked through with Harriet what happens on a typical day, and invited her to come to the building so she could get to know the geography of the place. Harriet spent a day there, watching what was going on and taking in the layout of the department. She also looked at various features, and then visited the features department of the Daily Telegraph, on the 15th floor at Canary Wharf, to get the feel of a different kind of newspaper in a different kind of place.
In Harriet’s novel, Martha and her husband are childless, and Martha wants a child, although she doesn’t know where this want comes from, and doesn’t entirely trust it. Harriet, therefore, needed to find out about fertility treatment. To research this, she telephoned Hammersmith hospital and spoke with an in vitro fertilisation counsellor, who told her that when a treatment fails, couples tend to keep trying again and again. In the novel, Martha and her husband are experiencing what’s called ‘unexplained infertility’. They’ve tried to have a child, but can’t, for some unknown reason. What interested Harriet, and this is one of the main themes of the novel, is why a woman who seemed to have everything is obsessed with having a child when she doesn’t really know why she wants one.
Martha’s husband has to return to San Francisco because his mother has a stroke. While he is there, he thinks the marriage will not last. Meanwhile Martha, in London, is thinking she is pregnant. A little later the young man, who has become a friend of both of them, comes round one Saturday thinking they’ll both be there. Martha, however, is alone, and distressed because she’s discovered she’s not pregnant after all.
Harriet told me that she found she had to walk around the part of London where she had the couple living, and also around San Francisco, so she could feel she was with her characters as they moved about their lives. Then she said that she has to let the characters grow inside her, has to wait until she can really hear their voice, and that this takes a lot of time.
I derived a checklist of guidelines from what Harriet told me:
1.Be clear about what you want to find out.
2.Ask people who know. Harriet found that people actively wanted to help her, and gave their time and knowledge generously.
3.Get as much written information as you can.
4.Get to know the areas you are writing about at ground level. Walk the streets. Feel the atmosphere.
5.Give your characters time to grow inside you. Feel them as people. Hear their voices.
Martina Evans
Martina Evans is an Irish novelist and poet, living in London, with three novels and two collections of poetry published. She won the Betty Trask Award for her first novel, Midnight Feast, has a fellowship from the Royal Literary Fund, and teaches creative writing. At present she’s working on a novel with the working title Bold O’Donohue, set during the time of the struggle for Irish independence, between 1902 and 1920. She talked with me about the development of this novel, and also about how her third novel, No Drinking, No Dancing, No Doctors, came into being.
With this third novel, she told me that the image that first came to her was of a somewhat cranky man who was born in the 1930s, and that this man subsequently changed into a woman. Martina wanted to write about religion, but not directly about Catholicism. What she did, therefore, was to invent her own religion, a fierce Protestant sect that allows none of the comforts listed in her book’s title.
Her inspiration also came from a memory. Before she began to work full time as a writer and a teacher, she was a radiographer in a hospital. She remembers preparing to X-ray an orthodox Jewish man who clearly found it hard to be treated by a woman, and who asked her to call in his wife to be with him. His wife entered, turned her back on him and gazed out of the window at the traffic while eating a banana. The memory of this couple, and Martina’s own unease in the man’s presence (she said she felt like a painted Jezebel, especially as she’d also just hennaed her hair), was the driving force in imagining the religious sect. She also said that her own mother had married young and that they’d lived on a farm, as the characters in her novel do. In speaking of the third and fourth novels, Martina concluded that a great deal of her writing derives from curiosity about her own parents, whose ages were very different, and that her fascination with the old Ireland comes from her love for her father, who was born in 1902. She also said that some people say all her novels are about the old Ireland, but she herself believes that the old Ireland still exists.
Martina’s fourth novel has as its main subject that of Republican women. Her father fought against the British presence in Ireland in the 1920s, but they never spoke about it. There were things that couldn’t be spoken of. Martina realised that she was trying, in her writing, to get a link back to her father’s world. She said she was fascinated by Margaret Atwood’s book, Negotiating with the Dead, where writing is seen as a journey to the underworld. Atwood argues that the dead actually want to speak, and call to the living to help them. She cited Derek Mahon’s poem ‘A Disused Shed in County Wexford’, where the mushrooms have been waiting ‘since civil war days’, representing the suppressed voices of the people of that time, as evidence of what she meant. The silences were a question that Martina had to deal with: what did actually happen with her father? She knew that he and his friend had been captured by the Black and Tans, badly treated and then released. She also knew that the Black and Tans were themselves traumatised, dreg soldiers, the scum from other wars.
Suddenly she found that everything was leading back to her father. Her father would have seen men going off to the First World War, and heard them singing songs like ‘The Boys from the Brigade’, which Martina had thought was an IRA song, but later discovered was a song from the First World War. She felt that the need to enter her father’s world was a strong urge throughout the book, even though she thought that she simply wanted to write about Republican women when she began. So the focus of the book changed during the course of her research. In researching her apparent theme, she discovered what she really wanted to write about.
In the early stages of preparation she was helped by a book called My Fight for Irish Freedom by Kathleen Clark, who was lady mayoress of Dublin after the war. Eileen Murphy, a character in the novel, is partly based on Kathleen Clark. After this, Martina spent some time working at the newspaper library in Colindale, north London. She told me that with the newspapers she had to let everything go in, absorb it, and then sit down to write without thinking about any of it at all.
A very early influence was her mother, who, she said, ‘listens very hard and remembers a great deal, and had been telling me stories since I was a child’. (Martina is the tenth and youngest child in the family, so you can imagine how many stories she heard.) Martina’s mother was born in 1919, and was herself picked up by the Black and Tans. Her grandma told her that they took her to a pub and spoke cockney to her, as if they were speaking French.
Martina discovered that the Black and Tans often picked up children, and that some of these children were Republican messengers, and were therefore in great danger. Some were killed by the soldiers. Tom Barry’s book Guerrilla Days in Ireland told her more about the Black and Tans, about their uniforms and how terrifying they looked, and she gradually learnt about her father’s part in this early, successful guerrilla war, which was led by young people, so the whole family had to get involved, and therefore the whole country.
After talking with Martina I realised that I needed to add an extra guideline to my checklist:
6.Be aware that your research might alter the focus of your writing, that during the course of your reading and thinking a character might step forward and demand your attention. Listen carefully for the dead who want to be heard, and let them speak through your writing.
Anita Lewton
Anita Lewton is a screenwriter and film producer. Her most recent production, in collaboration with Shane O’Sullivan, is a film called Lemon Crush, which is set in Chinatown and Soho, and is the story of a young Chinese waiter rekindling his friendship with his childhood sweetheart. This film has been screened at various international festivals, shown on Channel 4 and the Sundance Channel in the USA. Anita grew up in England and the Far East, and was a theatre director in the UK before moving to Los Angeles, where she studied film-making at University College of Los Angeles.
The film Anita is working on at present is based on an incident from her own experience, but with the characters and location changed. Her main character is a woman, a Scottish Italian in her thirties, who has the job of taking costumes for opera to Spoletto, a town in Italy. She is the single parent of a 12-year-old girl, although she leaves her child in Scotland while she travels. In Italy she makes contact with a younger man who is learning to be a webmaster and who wants to leave Italy. In the town, tourists come and go, and one of the film’s themes is the human tendency to project the possibility of happiness on to another place, another person. The Italian man has a long-term girlfriend, but wants a way out of his present situation. The Scottish-Italian woman, like him, feels trapped, and there is the mood in the film of having no more chances. Balancing this theme of risk and desperation is that of duty: especially the woman’s duty towards her daughter.
Anita told me that sometimes the setting of a film gets changed because of the possibility of development money. A film council will give money for a film based in one place but not in another. She said that this money can be crucial for a screenwriter, because the Media Plus programme in Brussels, for example, can give 6000 euros for a first draft. Obviously, this could keep writers going, and protect them from having to find other work while they are writing.
We talked about how themes might develop from film to film. When she was studying scriptwriting at UCLA, she managed apartments at Venice Beach to earn money, and worked in film studios at night. At film school, she noticed that her fellow students were tending to make coming-of-age films, with the theme of the father and the need to kick against his authority. In Anita’s present film, one of the themes is the recognition, on the part of the woman, of her age. Anita said: ‘When we grow older, we make patterns for our lives. My woman suddenly puts her head above the parapet.’
I asked her about how she found out enough to begin to write her screenplay. She described the process as ‘like Ariadne with her thread’, following the spool until she found what she wanted. For example: ‘I had to go and see an Italian-American film. It wasn’t very good, but I knew that I had to see it. I had to eat Italian food for a month. That was research, too.’ She also spoke of the inspiration of her own life, her own experience: ‘I’ve lived a lot as an immigrant. I was an illegal immigrant in America, and I feel like an immigrant here. My friends are from Ireland, Japan, New Zealand.’ So the research is coming from within as well as from without.
Like Martina, Anita said that some research came from newspapers – stories about asylum seekers, for example. But she emphasised that you must do your research in your own way. Her co-producer, Shane O’Sullivan, researched a Senegalese character entirely on the net, and when his film appeared, Senegalese actors in Paris couldn’t believe that he hadn’t done the research work in the field. Another screenwriter, however, researching material on the education system in Jamaica in the 1950s, spent six months getting information from the Jamaican High Commission. There is no one way. You have to find your own methods of research.
From talking to Anita, I added two more points to the checklist, although you may have found more. Mine are:
7.Look inside yourself. The internal research will help you with what you want to write about.
8.Do your research in the way that is most comfortable for you. Use new technology if you wish, but use other resources too.
Jane Corbett
I then approached Jane Corbett, a novelist and screenwriter, whose latest films are Chaos, a TV film about a young man who teaches chaos theory at a university, whose wife is killed by a young woman stalker, and Julie’s Ghost, which won the Sundance Award for the best independent film.
Jane echoed Martina’s thoughts about the tendency of characters to change sex during the course of the writing. She said that in Julie’s Ghost, the original focus of the film was the mother of Julie, who gets killed in a road accident. She knew that this focus wasn’t right, but the story didn’t seem to want to go away. And she said she often started a story with a young man, and then ended by seeing it from a woman’s point of view. In Julie’s Ghost, Jane wanted the main character to be an artist, and found that she became a textile designer, ‘because a dress show is almost theatre, something you can show’. So here, the demands of the film medium, which requires something very visual, determined what kind of artist her main character would be.
In Jane’s experience, you wait until the script is ready before you go after finance. She finds it takes about a year before a script is at the point where you can show it to producers. Jane works in close collaboration with the German film director Bettina Wilhelm, who does most of the research for the films. Jane tends to work by instinct, checking with Bettina (‘How do we do this?’) when she wants to make something happen in the film. The script editor Barry Devlin gave detailed comments on their present project, and Jane said she finds that a script gets better as different collaborators go over it and bring in different levels of meaning, implication and significance.
The script she has just completed is called The Price of Miracles. It’s a thriller, but within a political context. Set in Johannesburg, it pursues an ecological theme, with pharmaceutical companies involved in drug experiments. At first, Jane thought that the setting of the film would be a European city, but she couldn’t pinpoint, in her mind, which one. A sign, she said, that something wasn’t right. Then one of the producers said: ‘Why don’t you set the whole thing in South Africa?’ Johannesburg, with its frontier-town feeling, made sense to her, so, as in Anita Lewton’s experience, the setting can end up being changed for all kinds of reasons. In the case of Jane’s film, the setting changed to a place where there is the possibility of fewer checks on the drugs experiments that are taking place.
There is a trilogy of characters in The Price Of Miracles. One of the men was the main character at first, but then a woman of mixed race moved into the lead, someone with one foot in Britain and one in Africa, who only meets her father, a jazz musician, when she returns to Africa.
I came away from talking to Jane with two more points to add to the checklist:
9.You don’t have to do all your own research. Friends and collaborators can help you. Ask them about what you need to find out.
10.Trusted colleagues can be invaluable when your script is in its early stages. Ask them to read it and give their comments.
Katherine Crawford
Katherine Crawford is a novelist and an art dealer. She has published a novel called The Collecting Point and her agent is at present trying to sell the film rights for it. Having read the novel, I agree that it’s a particularly visual and exciting story, perfect material for a film.
Part of Katherine’s life has been spent travelling in order to curate art exhibitions in different parts of the world. She told me that, sitting in restaurants on different continents on her own, the idea came to her of a young curator who decided to mount an exhibition of paintings that had been stolen, or bought for peanuts, by the Nazis before and during the Second World War. The story of how she achieves her ambition is the story of the novel.
During the action her heroine discovers how deep the collaboration with the Nazis went, that there are still many paintings of dubious provenance in state museums, and that the major auction houses continue to collude in the conspiracy of silence about who these art works originally belonged to. The novel looks at the prevalence of fraud in the art world, and one woman’s struggle to make some sort of reparation.
The idea had been germinating in Katherine for a long time. It may have rooted in 1971, when she was offered a picture and asked if she would sell it by private treaty. This means that the seller either did not have, or did not want to show, the history of the painting’s ownership. This was the opening in Katherine herself: the awareness that all was not well and that there was a significant snag in the fabric of her profession.
After this, she found that apparent accidents in her daily life were offering her more and more information which she could use in the novel. For example, a conversation at Los Alamos with a German friend told her a great deal about life in Germany during the war. Two terrible events in her own life – the illness and death of one of her sons, and then her own near-fatal illness – drove her on. She said that during the writing she was in a trance, thinking about what this or that character would do in a given situation. Katherine felt that she had to get the novel finished, no matter how many times she had to rewrite it. As an art curator, she had never felt confident about her writing. She knew that she had a good story, but she didn’t know she could write it. By the time the novel was published and she’d read it to reading groups and been given much praise, she knew she could write. The novel therefore played a significant part in her own recovery.
Katherine did a great deal of her research in libraries. The Wiener Library in Devonshire Place, London gave her much Second World War material, and the archivists at the Royal Mint Library alerted her to the fact that a great deal of treasure and money was still hidden. When she encountered unhelpful officials, she sniffed further, did more research into the source of a painting and often uncovered fraudulent dealings and Nazi theft.
In 1997 there was a sale of looted art in Vienna, and a London auction house conducted a lecture on it, trying to absolve themselves from any responsibility or guilt. When Katherine asked who chose the artworks that were to be sold (implying that there may have been many that were not chosen to be sold, and therefore still in illegal hands), she was given no answer. The lecture fuelled her commitment to the project and made her recognise just how much treasure had been stolen and how much theft covered up.
After talking with Katherine I added two more points to the checklist:
11.If you can, work on a writing project that is interwoven with your own knowledge and experience. You already know about things that nobody else knows about. Use your own unique experience.
12.Trust accidents and chance conversations. Once you have your focus, the knowledge you need will come to you. Remember that the story wants to be written. You’re just the conduit.
In my discussions with these five writers I became aware that there are many ways of doing your research. Everyone finds their own way, which may be partly dictated by the type of material you are investigating. So don’t think that you have to follow a blueprint, because there isn’t one. All I’ve done here is to distil certain guidelines from the experience of the writers, which I hope will be useful to you. If they aren’t, you’ll soon discover your own. Let me leave the last word with William Blake, rebel and visionary and peerless poet, who said: ‘I must create a system of my own, or be the slave to another man’s.’