Dec 20 2008
A Field Trip Into Your Head
“Research” Has A Broad Meaning for Fiction Writers
I recently finished Robert McKee’s Story, and it’s going on my shelf of writing books to return to over and over again. While McKee’s subject matter is writing for movies (the subtile is Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting), his interest is the broader process of developing good stories.
One topic of specific interest to me was his discussion of research (pg 72-76). To most people, particularly people like me with history degrees, research means poring through books, preferably large, old, and dusty ones. McKee includes our type of research, but only after two others.
Memory, Imagination, Fact
McKee’s first source of research material is the writer’s own memory: the writer’s personal experience that might be relevant to the character. This will be especially familiar to all those children’s writer who have tried to use their own childhood experiences to write for modern children. But the comparison need not be that close. A speculative writer trying to create an exciting chase scene of space ships navigating through planetary debris might draw on his own experience racing off-road vehicles with his buddies in high school.
The second source of material is imagination, which McKee considers similar to memory, but more fragmentary. These might include bits of dreams and nightmares that a writer can draw on when setting tone. Stephen King’s ability to write scores of darkly imaginative work became much more understandable to me after reading his stories about a youth full of drug and alcohol addiction in On Writing (a well-executed autobiography/craft book hybrid).
Fact, such as historical events and scientific principles, is the third source of material to be researched. It is also this type of research that McKee suggests whenever a writer feels “blocked.” In his words, because I like them so much:
You’re blocked because you have nothing to say. Your talent didn’t abandon you. If you had something to say, you couldn’t stop yourself from writing. You can’t kill your talent, but you can starve it into a coma through ignorance… Do research. Feed your talent.
The result, according to McKee, will be a suffusing of story material through a writer’s mind, until the characters seem to act on their own.
Having research broken down in this way was reassuring to me, because if if I can count pre-story writing (the prose equivalents of doodles) as legitimate imaginative research, then I can be less frustrated by my low word/hr productivity. Of course research mustn’t ever be a form of procrastination, but better understanding what reasearch factors contribute to a story can greatly help me keep them in the right balance.