4.1 Building your story

Part 4.1 Notebook habit
30 mins

• Listen to what novelists think about research
• Develop further a notebook habit for research and idea

Keeping a writer’s notebook

We are reminded of the importance of the notebook; how it is a place of permission, where you can record, map, and work up ideas. This can be releasing when you feel you have writer’s block or have lost inspiration; there will be constellations of ideas and impulses ready to prompt you.

It’s also a place to journal, if you want to keep track of your thoughts about writing. My experience is that this can help get me through difficult moments, and keep me motivated. Often it is some unresolved concern or unprocessed emotion which interrupts my writing, rather than anything more practical.

I do have a notebook for long-form journalling or ideas sessions, but for keeping daily notes, I use my phone. It’s always to hand and it’s one less thing to carry. Then I can allocate notes to different projects / idea groups later, and record them coherently on a digital document.

Research

For me, making things up usually involves learning about facts. Unless the world of your novel is completely familiar to me, there will be research. 

The novelists Tim Pears, Patricia Duncker, and Alex Garland have recorded audio about their approach to research.

Pears loves research: he bases a novel on what he wants to find out about 
– a novelist is a guardian of memory – though novelists’ memories are often poor!
– uses photographs, films, art

Duncker also values research: she thinks that all novels are historical novels
– her research is mainly about professions, locations, places

Garland is wary of research: his “research” was real-life experience of backpacking – it was about interacting with a world, rather than studying it academically
– be careful of research – it can divert from imaginative work, and leave the story too heavy on facts, instead of emotional content

My thoughts on research

This may sound facile but my aim is to find the right amount of research. This is often harder than I expect. The more I research, the more story opportunities open up. Like Garland, I see how I may be pulled off my original path. But like Pears and Duncker, I also rejoice in research, because it is just stories, some of which are stranger than fiction. It ensures that I open myself to different perspectives and don’t enter each story with too many biases and assumptions. 

This is especially true for stories set in distant time periods, when people lived by different paradigms and ideas of “normal”.  Part of what makes different times, places, or subjects interesting to me, is how they dislodge my feelings of what is “normal”. If I want to involve the reader in the spirit / philosophy of another world, then I want to understand what their “normal” is, and work out from there. Without this deeper understanding, I might use my own assumptions about how the world operates, which are not neutral; they are suffused with the philosophic and economic system in which I grew up. And that might not be a literary crime, but it would be a missed opportunity. It would be a misstep for me to start my narrative from too modern a perspective, and I won’t be able to tell how modern my perspective is until I compare it.

Research can also differentiate characters in the same narrative from each other. This is obviously true if they have distinct careers or backgrounds, although it can equally apply to more subtle life experiences.

So, for me, research is about finding out what is “true” for that world or character, which forms the framework and rules for our fictional imaginings.

It is “enough” when I know what kind of challenges and opportunities exist, and how people would respond to them. It is “too much” when I find myself trying to answer every question or track down every lead, rather than starting to write and leaving blanks to fill in later.

Basically, if it supports my writing, it is enough. If it blocks it, it is either too little or too much.

And that changes all the time.

The notebook habit

aka the writing habit.

We are encouraged to be in the habit of writing something – even if just recording a fact – every day. 

Exercise

Either:

> find three possible story ideas from your notebook and research one element for each

or

> find one possible story and research three elements

Then develop the idea using the research and any sensory details which come to you.

The comments from my peers on this course are generally positive; this seems to have given them confidence that they can discover ideas fairly easily.

But I need to approach this exercise with caution! I do not lack ideas. No siree. My issue is that I am too often drawn off from my stated goal by the siren-call of new stories. This is something that previously reassured me, but now it has become a habit to lose focus. 

I already have a story I want to tell, and all the writings I do for this course are part of working out that world. So I used this exercise to build up a character who already exists in that world, rather than start a new story. [I’ve not posted it here.]

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Give the course a spin yourself! 
www.futurelearn.com/courses/start-writing-fiction