research yourself, research your fiction, know more

I confess to a certain panic.  Its causes are many, but here is one:  It is difficult for me to find the time to write, and when I do find that time, I am not writing.  I am reading the books that no one has checked out of Van Pelt Library for a very long time (ever?).  I am listening to old and scratchy German songs recorded (who knows why) on YouTube.  I am going blog by blog until I find (miraculously!) a photograph of a street corner that I walked once but cannot now remember.

I may be writing a novel, but if you were to see my office (though please don't; its disarray could offend you), you would see how it is:  the books that surround me are not my own.

Two years ago, I gave a talk about the research that underpins all my work—memoir, fable, fiction, poetry.  I was remembering this passage of the talk today.  Consoling myself (for I need to be consoled) about the slow, slow, slow of my writerly process.

Whether I’m writing memoir or novels, fables or poems, novels for adults or for young adults, I am, at one point, reaching far beyond myself to bring the greater world in.  I am following the always persistent, hardly consistent, rarely well-tiled path of my insatiable curiosity.  True, research is often either a surfeit of overwhelm, or a tease.  Still, and nevertheless, I don’t believe in bringing presumption to the page—in writing simply and only what I already know.  I don’t believe in closing doors before I’ve opened windows.  I want to be alive when I am writing—engaged, in suspense, full of the unprotected what ifs?  I want to convey my own surprise, dismay, or basic indignity right there, on the page.  Formulas don’t cut it for me.  Formulas have been done.  Research scrambles the math.