^The Authors’ Atrium

I have a confession, and I’d like it received gently. I finished a short piece this week after six weeks of work, and four of those weeks were research. Everyone else here seems to turn out a finished thing in the time it takes me to settle on what a single neighborhood was called, and I’m starting to wonder whether anyone can tell the difference on the page. I keep telling myself the accuracy matters even if nobody notices it, but it’s getting harder to believe that when my spreadsheet is bigger than my manuscript. Is it actually worth it, or have I just built myself a very elaborate way of not finishing?

Six weeks is not a symptom. It’s a number, and the number says nothing about whether the piece is good. If the research is making you miserable and the piece worse, stop. If it’s making the piece better, ignore the calendar, because nobody is grading you on speed. It generally works. If not, alcohol works, too.

Hawthorne, take a moment and breathe. Your work is the only thing on this board I read twice, and I don’t read anything twice. Fast writers leave seams, and I can see every one of them. Yours I have to go looking for, and I haven’t found one yet.

I’d like it noted that I have sat through your explanations of why a certain word could not have been used before a certain decade, and I resented every minute of them. Then I read the piece, and it was better for it, which I resented more. People don’t finish your work and shrug. They finish it and then think about it for a week, and I can’t think of many writers on this board who can say that. I’ll deny having written this paragraph if anyone quotes it back to me.

Hawthorne, you’re not slow, you’re doing the hard work, even if it isn’t what we’d call “smart work.” The depth you get is real, and people can feel it even when they can’t name it. That said, and I say this with love, have you ever tried the ugly-first-draft method? Write the whole thing with [FIX LATER] stuck in every spot where you’d normally go dig, and only then do the research, because by that point you know exactly which holes matter.

Thank you, all of you. Bronte, I’m keeping that. Twain, I’m choosing to believe you said it and meant it, and I won’t ask you to confirm. Dumas, I’ve tried your method more than once and I can’t make it work, because if I don’t know what the neighborhood was called I certainly can’t see the street, and if I can’t see it I can’t walk anyone down it. I once lost an entire weekend to whether a particular kind of lamp existed in a particular decade, and the lamp appears in one sentence. I’d do it again, which I think is the problem I’m actually asking about.

I hold that anything past three sources is an academic paper and not fiction.

Three is a number Poe made up because it sounds tidy. Here’s the real rule: research until you can lie about the thing without flinching, and then write. Anything after that is stalling. Anything before it is guessing, and you’ll get caught.

Bronte’s rule works right up until the reader knows more than you do, and one of them always does. You can’t tell ahead of time which detail that reader will be holding, so the only protection is to either know all of them—that’s what Hawthorne’s spreadsheet is, an insurance policy with footnotes—or pretend you do and don’t read the notices. Poe’s three sources would be fine if the world were polite enough to ask its questions in order. Unfortunately, audience is a chaotic mistress.

Okay, but here’s my whole case: research you do before a draft is aimed at a book you haven’t written yet. Half of it is for scenes that get cut, and you’ve paid full price for every bit of it! Research after the draft goes straight where it’s needed, so it’s cheaper and it hits harder. Which makes me wonder, how many facts does a reader actually hold onto after closing a book? Could anyone here name one date from the last thing they read? Because if the answer’s zero, what are we even paying for?

Dumas, I can name one, and it was in something I read years ago, because it was so quietly right that it rearranged the whole scene around it. I think that’s what I’ve been missing in all of this: it isn’t how much I research, it’s whether it reaches the sentence. Most of mine doesn’t. A great deal of it sits in the spreadsheet and I enjoy it there, and a small, hard part becomes one line that makes the page feel true. I may try your aimed pass on the next piece, just once, and report back honestly if it goes badly.

Hawthorne, that was exactly the right question to end on, and I’d say you’ve answered it better than any of us. You can all be right here, which is the annoying part, because Dumas and Bronte aren’t disagreeing about the facts, only about where in the process they’d rather suffer. And Poe, three is a number you picked because it’s pretty, so let’s not pretend otherwise. Twain, I saw what you said—I’ll decide later if I’m going to hold you to it.