THOUGHTS ON RESEARCH: HOW MUCH IS
ENOUGH, HOW MUCH IS TOO MUCH?
December 1987
Toward the end of July, Lynne and I were in Detroit, where we spent a couple of hours visiting Joan and Elmore Leonard. Mr. Leonard is the bestselling author of Glitz and Bandits and Touch, and if we’d arrived a few days later we would have missed him, because he was planning a visit to Cape Girardeau, Missouri.
Cape Girardeau, as you may know, is a city of 35,000 situated on the Mississippi in the southeast corner of the state, a little more than a hundred miles south of St. Louis. It might seem an unlikely spot for a visit from a top suspense novelist, especially one who has been cited by Playgirl magazine as one of the ten sexiest men in America. What, I wondered, was drawing Dutch Leonard to Cape Girardeau?
The name, he explained. “I liked the sound of it,” he said, “and I had it in mind for some time that I might set a book there. And then I had the idea of starting a book with an airplane crash, and someone’s killed in it, and there’s an insurance investigation of a relative of the victim. And I thought maybe the crash could take place in Cape Girardeau, and then the story would move on somewhere else from there.”
Mr. Leonard makes occasional use of a researcher, and in this instance his researcher had other business that would bring him close to Cape Girardeau. He went there and returned with the answers to some questions, along with an array of material from the local chamber of commerce. All of this had enabled Mr. Leonard to conclude that Cape Girardeau would do nicely for the book he had in mind, and now he was going there himself to see the place with his own eyes and get the feel of it.
I found this very interesting, not least because I had just recently completed a novel that sprawls across 18 states. While I had, at one time or another, been in all of those states, I had by no means visited every city and town where I’d set a scene. In my book, a group of people walk from Oregon to Minnesota, and some of the roads they use are ones I’ve never seen, let alone covered on foot.
Was my research slipshod? Was Dutch Leonard’s excessive?
When filmmakers select the settings for the various scenes of their film, they call the process “scouting locations.” The writer of prose fiction goes through a similar process. He may do his scouting in person, winging off to Cape Girardeau or hopping on a crosstown bus, or he may accomplish much the same thing in the library, or over the telephone.
On the other hand, he can produce a lifetime of fiction without ever having the need to scout a location He can set all his works in locations that he knows intimately to begin with. Or, like a filmmaker fabricating a set on a Hollywood studio sound stage, he can invent a location out of the whole cloth, just as he invents his characters and his storyline.
This is the rule, of course, when one is dealing with mythical worlds or writing books set on other planets or in vanished or as-yet-unborn civilizations, but it is just as valid an option when one is writing realistic contemporary fiction. William Faulkner, using rural Mississippi as the setting for his fiction, called it Yoknapatawpha County and invented its history and geography accordingly. John O’Hara changed his hometown’s name from Pottsville to Gibbsville and changed Harrisburg to Fort Penn, partly perhaps as a barrier to libel suits, but at least as much to be free to create his own fictional reality. Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct novels are set in Isola, a city that is clearly meant to be New York, but with its geography purposely skewed. Mr. McBain knows New York, and has written about it in other books under its own name (and under his own name of Evan Hunter) but in his police procedural novels he chose to reinvent New York so as to avoid having to revise police procedure with every structural change in the actual New York Police Department, and to escape the need to keep pace with the constantly changing landscape of the city.
It seems to me that Mr. McBain, in choosing Isola over New York as his setting, was also making a fundamental decision as to what his books were going to be about. They are about the particular stories they tell, the commissions and solutions of specific crimes. They are about the lives of their characters, the police officers and criminals and others who people them. Each book, too, is about its own particular theme, whatever that may be, and all of the books are about crime and detection and punishment and life and death.
Finally, because the characters and their lives are of the sort indigenous to New York City, the books are about New York—but to a much lesser extent than if Mr. McBain called the city by its rightful name. One need only refer to his recent novel, Another Part of the City, a book specifically about a New York policeman, to see the difference.
In my own six novels about ex-cop Matthew Scudder, New York is unquestionably one of the things I’m writing about, and accordingly the city looms as a strong presence and the neighborhoods in which scenes are set received more than cursory research. The books range rather widely through Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens—I don’t recall having set scenes in the Bronx or Staten Island—so I took a fair number of long subway rides and meandering walks while researching and writing them.
Sometimes this research provided me with details that helped highlight a scene. Sometimes, serendipitously, I would turn up something at a location that would suggest a turn in a plot. And on some occasions I probably didn’t encounter anything noteworthy, and could have written the scene about as effectively without leaving my apartment—but having been on the scene enabled me to visualize what I was writing about and to write about it with, I suspect, more authority than I would have otherwise.
While writing Random Walk, I sat in a small studio at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and wrote scenes set in innumerable locations strewn across those 18 states. While I would have loved to trace the route in advance, in a car if not on foot, I never seriously considered doing so. For one thing, I didn’t have the time; for another, I didn’t know the route in advance, any more than I knew exactly how the plot would take form. All of this revealed itself to me while I sat in my studio in Virginia.
The simplest alternative to research, it seemed to me, would be to make up names for the towns my pilgrims passed through and numbers for the roads they traversed. There wouldn’t have been anything wrong with such an approach, and it would have freed me to invent towns and terrain to suit my story. I don’t know that it would have made much difference to the average reader; what reader in Texas, say, would care if an incident took place in Clay County, Montana, which doesn’t exist, or in Musselshell County, which does?
Somehow, though, I felt I wanted to anchor my story with real towns and real roads, not because it would make a difference to readers but because it would make a considerable difference to me. I wanted to know where those people were. The more specific I was about locations, the more real the story became in my own mind. I wanted to be able to look at a map and know how far they’d come, and how far along the next town was and what highway they’d come to next. My vision did not have to coincide with reality—I was perfectly willing to put a gas station at a particular intersection, without knowing whether some entrepreneur had seen fit to put one there in actuality—but it had to be specific enough so that it felt real to me.
I had three atlases with me, and perhaps a dozen guide books of one sort or another. I put in ten-hour days on Random Walk, and when I wasn’t actually writing I was generally paging through guide books or poring over maps. The maps in particular were a way of tapping into fictive reality. I would look at a road on the map and see what that road was like, and what sort of country lay on either side of it. I don’t mean to suggest that what I saw had anything to do with what’s actually out there, but it helped make the whole thing real enough for me so that I could write the scenes.
I had several goals. I wanted to feel confident enough about what I was doing so that my confidence would make itself felt in my writing. I wanted to appear sufficiently informed so that a native of, say, Burns, Oregon, would not come away from a scene set in that town with the suspicion that the writer had never been there. And, at the same time, I wanted to bear in mind throughout that I was not writing a travel book. I was trying to produce a novel, to tell a story, and all the locations were there to anchor the story and enhance its effect upon the reader.
Let’s return for a moment to Dutch Leonard’s trip to Cape Girardeau. He was putting in more research time to add verisimilitude to an opening scene than I’d invested in my whole novel. Was I being slipshod? Or was he wasting time?
He had other options, certainly. He could have learned enough about Cape Girardeau without leaving his desk to set a scene there that anyone would find convincing, whether or not they’d ever spent time in the area. He has, after all, written excellent novels of the American West in addition to his contemporary crime fiction, and he hasn’t had to travel in time to manage it.
Or, if he wanted to stick to what he knows firsthand, he could have had his airplane crash occur in some town with which he’s familiar. There was no predetermined plotting requirement that the book open in Cape Girardeau; he’d picked it in the first place because he sort of liked the sound of it.
I would certainly argue that Mr. Leonard’s instinctive impulse to set the book’s opening in Cape Girardeau was worth following, and that the intuitive decision to see the place with his own eyes is wholly justifiable. He is, let it be said, a writer who has done extremely well critically and commercially over a fair number of years by writing his books as he thinks and feels they ought to be written. His plots generally evolve as he writes the books; he has found that if he comes up with some compelling characters and puts them in a dramatic situation he will be able to think up things for them to do. Who knows what bits of plot business, what incidents, what added dimensions of character, might come into being as a result of an actual visit to Cape Girardeau? And who knows what sort of intuitive guidance might have led him to select that city in the first place?
Writing, as I’ve observed before, is not an exact science. There’s no right or wrong way to do it. When you find a method that works, you change it at your peril.
Should everyone make a comparable pilgrimage to Cape Girardeau? More to the point, is every intuitive prompting toward on-the-spot research one that ought to be heeded?
I think not. A few years ago a student in one of my classes was writing a short story set in Jerusalem, and she had stopped work on it in order to obtain maps of the city so that she could get the names of the streets right. The type of story she was writing did not require that the streets be named, or that she have any of the data she was planning to research, and in the course of discussion it became clear that she was using research as a way to avoid getting to work on a story she was scared to write. I could sympathize; ages ago, before I had ever written a novel, I decided to write a political thriller set during the Irish Rising of 1916. I knew nothing about the period, began reading books on Irish history, decided that an understanding of Irish history would require as a foundation an understanding of English history, and that one might as well begin at the beginning; accordingly I started reading Oman’s six-volume history of Britain before the Norman Conquest. I did not finish Oman—nor, of course, did I ever begin work on that Irish novel, a book that I was in every respect quite unequipped to write. By piling on the research, I was making sure that I would never be ready to write the book, and would thus never have to face the fact that I was unequal to the task.