Howdy, everyone. When you're planning out a new story, or even contributing new threads to an existing story, how important do you consider research to your writing? Not just watching-porn-and-calling-it-research, but looking up nonfiction sources to answer any questions you might have. And in what way? For instance, if you're writing a story set in a different time period, do you read up on the clothing, customs, etc. of the people who lived through that time? I ask because I've been trying to wrap my head around a character in someone else's story with anxiety about her body image, and I ended up with my nose buried in Dr. Emily Nagoski's Come As You Are, which explains the many ways a woman's sexuality might develop and present itself. Even as a man, it contains a lot of information I didn't know and some deeply thought-provoking factoids that (I hope) will give me some welcome breadth as a writer. Please leave the titles, authors, URLs, what-have-you of anything you've found especially helpful!
For my own stories, absolutely vital. Since the stories involve sex, I particularly read up on clothing (especially underclothing) of whatever period I am writing about, but I even check up on the layout of houses, furniture and even what food is available. Additionally I check on social customs. I also research sexual positions and what is physically possible. For instance when one of my characters had to try and pierce a heart, I asked for advice on how this was medically possible. However Hollywood never seems to take these things seriously and if you are writing fantasy then all things are possible so I am just saying what I do and do not judge anyone else for using artistic license. As a male though I do have difficulty in writing sex scenes from a female POV. It would be quite difficult during sex to ask a partner what she is feeling and even then I am not sure I would believe her. In fact it is hard enough to remember the sensations I feel as I am so caught up in the moment and am normally concentrating.
I look up all sorts of things while writing stories. What names are common in a certain country or amongst a particular ethnic background, what the positions in an American football team are called, a map of New Orleans, the difference between federal and state jurisdiction and any other facts that I don't know off the top of my head. Mainly for stories set in the present in the US, what might be common knowledge if you live there is a mystery for me. I generally just use Wikipedia.
I have had to check up things like at what age are students in what schools in USA to make sure their age adds up correctly.
Yes! Architecture, social customs, little things that people in the world would never have to think about, like WWII soldiers looking for German infiltrators: What's the capital of Delaware? Who won the 1939 World Series? I've been thinking of a story set in a toxic Downton Abbey, for all intents and purposes, and I've been wondering about the floor plans of such a house but also how many servants you can feasibly run it with if the family is dissolute and held in poor regard. I feel like that can give me some wiggle room, as the servants have no discipline and ignore the norms, but in order to portray that as shocking it feels important to know specifically what the expectations are. Names specifically are a big one for me as well, android1966.I'd like to give characters something distinctive, but without that cultural context, it's hard to tell when you've saddled them with the equivalent of "John Smith" or, at the opposite end of the spectrum, "North West." Government functions, too, where officials from multiple agencies or levels of government might conflict. But then, bureaucracy being the immovable object that it is, it's easier to get away with that kind of confusion if the agencies involved can't decide for themselves who's responsible! Agreed, it's not helpful to be a stickler for minutia when the story itself is so far beyond that. I'm very much a writer who feels compelled to have all the little puzzle pieces fit together before I start writing, and that ends up delaying me at times. That's why I'm curious about other people's habits, I guess: at what point do you decide you've got enough to start writing and you'll pick up the rest as you get to it and/or if you really need to? Writing from a woman's perspective feels very tricky to get right. I always worry that something will ring false and turn the reader off, thinking, "This guy has no idea what appeals to women." For physical detail, I often latch onto things past partners have said and make (I hope!) logical leaps from there. Emotionally or mentally, I'd recommend Come As You Are or the author's blog. They really are great resources.
Funny you should mention "Downton Abbey", because I too have been thinking along the same lines. Admittedly I do not really watch the show - although I enjoyed "Gosford Park" - so I do not want to parody the characters, more the setting which would become a pressurised cooker of sexual energy. Master and maids; mistress and butler; sons and housekeeper/maids; daughters and footmen; butler and maids; cook and maids; maids and maids; and of course incest! This is even before the guests arrive.
I'm an inconsistent viewer, and my sister often has to fill in the gaps for me, but I enjoy the show and have heard good things about Gosford Park. That would be my intent as well: not to lampoon specific characters or plotlines, but to use the relationships between different classes and the manor house as a backdrop for that brewing tension. It's an idea rich with potential, and "even before the guests arrive" is just what I'm thinking of! It's so isolated, how else does one pass the time? Is this the Hellfire Club story you're referring to, or a separate concept?
No, Patzo, it's a separate concept. The Hellfire story is a definite narrative set towards the end of the 18th century, whereas the Downton story set in the 1920s would be more of a setup which I and hopefully others would evolve. I have just been looking at the Wikipedia entry for Great Houses and found there are something like 30 different jobs!! Downton Abbey, being a Great House, would undoubtedly have a bigger staff than shown and hardly ever features the gardening and stable staff. Everyone would need to be 18 so roles like Page and Hall Boy would have to become Dogsbody to match up with the lowest female servants Scullery Maid and Between Maid. Just thinking out loud before anything concrete, my cast list might include: Upstairs Lord, Lady and 2 sons, 3 daughters, a female companion (former governess), a live-in Estate Manager + a handful of close relations + guests Downstairs Butler, Valet, Chauffer, Head Footman, 2 Footman, Dogsbody Housekeeper, Lady's Maid, Head Housemaid, 2 Chamber Maids, 2 Parlour Maids, 2 Laundry Maids Cook, Head Kitchen Maid, 2 Kitchen Maids, Scullery Maid, Between Maid, Still Room Maid Outside Stable Master, 2 Grooms (maybe 1 is a girl) Head Gardner, Groundskeeper, 3 Gardeners, Handyman Gameskeeper, Assistant Gameskeeper N.B. I would imagine the outside workers live in cottages on the estate and feed themselves. This sounds like an awful lot (16ish upstairs, 34 downstairs) but look at the size of the house and is certainly a more realistic balance than in the TV show. Perhaps I'm being too ambitious
Oh wow. It makes sense they'd compress some roles because the audience would never remember that many names, but wow. You're right: having a cast that covers both the upper class and those beneath stairs distracts from just how large the support staff must be for that house. That said, ambitious for just one writer, yes, but for a collaborative story I think it's perfect! Everyone has the chance to pick out and develop a few of these roles and send them off on misadventures. In a house that crowded, there's no way a day goes by without someone vigorously dusting in a quiet corner.
http://www.highclerecastle.co.uk/ aka Downton Abbey has over 50 bedrooms and 100 years ago had 60 staff. The Staff Bellboard (whatever that is) has 67 named locations! Perhaps they should have chosen a smaller stately home for the series. Perhaps not quite as ridiculous as Mr Darcy living in Chatsworth House in the most recent Pride and Prejudice film ... a Mr. in a ducal palace! From Wikipedia the staff at Chatsworth between the Wars was as follows: a butler, under butler, groom of the chambers, valet, three footmen, a housekeeper, the Duchess's maid, 11 housemaids, two sewing women, a cook, two kitchen maids, a vegetable maid, two or three scullery maids, two stillroom maids, a dairy maid, six laundry maids and the Duchess's secretary. All of these 38 or 39 people lived in the house. Daily staff included the odd man, upholsterer, scullery-maid, two scrubbing women, laundry porter, steam boiler man, coal man, two porter's lodge attendants, two night firemen, night porter, two window cleaners, and a team of joiners, plumbers and electricians. The Clerk of Works supervised the maintenance of the house and other properties on the estate. There were also grooms, chauffeurs and gamekeepers. The number of garden staff was somewhere between the 80 of the 6th Duke's time and the 20 or so of the early 21st century. There was also a librarian, Francis Thompson, who wrote the first book-length account of Chatsworth since the 6th Duke's handbook. Looks like I missed a seamstress and vastly underestimated the gardening staff - actually I did wonder how 1 groundskeeper was going to mow all the lawns.
With a setup with that much people I could imagine a story with "60" different point of views and only parallel branches. Branches can't split except for introducing new people and changing the POV from one to another. So all things, that happend in the branch of any person are also "fact" in all other branches/POVs. E.g. if someone dies, he can't be used in other ones story. Some of the other persons could participate the funeral or being happy or down about that. Some could talk about in their own branches or ignoring it. If someone cheats his partner, some of the other persons would know it. They have seen it, heard it or just know it from a good source. Some maybe hear rumors about it, while others don't even know. You could describe the same things from different POVs. Maybe you tell about a man, who is in love with a girl, while the girl just wants something from him and uses sex to get it. Then the reader could decide, which story he wants to read. If he reads more branches, he will sometimes remind things and see another aspects of it. Maybe he will think different about a well-known bitch, after he hear the story from her point of view... Back to topic: I think, it is important to do some research, as I really dislike it as a reader, if some thinks are really unlogical. The more the reader knows about the background of a story, the more he will feel uncomfortable, if it doesn't fit.
This has become almost an example of when too much attention to detail causes the author too many problems. Trugbild, I think it would require a lot of thought to how to get this going - TBH I was probably going for a brief introduction of the location and the characters and let people form their own branches of liaisons rather than providing events. I did have the idea that the Lord and Lady (Duke and Duchess) had an open marriage being wildly Bohemian and with it set in the 20s that kind of post war live for today attitude of the flappers. Staff members, who might be employed partly on looks (or given a chance if they had previously been caught having improper relations by other employers) would at the least be expected to look the other way at whatever went on and the Aristos would similarly not be too strict about whatever the staff got up to provided it did not affect their work. I think it is better to scale this down to a smaller country house, ditch the extra family members (maybe 1 niece or nephew) leaving 8/9 upstairs. Downstairs we can lose a kitchen maid, a footman (unless we are allowing gay relationships like Downton), one of the laundry maids if the chambermaids help out. Outside the Lord might decide he only wants the front lawn with the rest wild so we can ditch 3 of the gardening staff but keep the sporting staff. That should bring it down to 40 so less than 'The Simpsons' I like the ideas of the Head Kitchen Maid and the Still Room Maid buying aphrodisiacs down the market and maybe mixing a few special potions of their own, the Between Maid serving the Cook, Butler and Housekeeper in turn, the Dogsbody being particularly pervy, and plenty of passion in the stable. Perhaps after this I should put these posts in the Story Ideas Forum!
@Trugbild, I love that idea, that all the alternate threads share a continuity. You're seeing alternate perspectives, rather than alternate possibilities, of the same story. I'd love to write for a story like that! The problem is, you'd have a devil of a time trying to coordinate it all: I'm almost afraid you'd have to start it as a private story and open it to other contributors later. @Beeble42, yes, I think that's what you'd need: one long thread, or a few moderate ones, to introduce the important features of the setting and the character relationships. If you can communicate the desired "feel" of the story up front, that will get everyone in the right mindset, and I think the nobles' disregard for marital norms, along with the beauty of the staff compared to their discipline, will make that an easy sell. Those sound like reasonable steps to thin the number of characters, identifying roles that can be filled by making others more flexible. Otherwise they may take up so much space you'd forget the names of people in your day-to-day life! And the idea that the Lord keeps the minimum decorum for appearances' sake, and that the Kitchen Maid and Still Room Maid have a private stock of sugar and spice, has me excited for it already! You should absolutely post these to Story Ideas. It will draw more people to chime in with possibilities, since "Researching Stories" must sound a bit broad to anyone who hasn't already skimmed this thread.
Sharing continuity between parallel threads only works if the only questions are "which people do we follow?" otherwise the options cause differences as the threads branch out. But you can also wrap things up occasionally with stuff like "and the next morning how do things continue?" as long as you don't go into details of what happened previously.
As you've probably guessed from our earlier conversations, research is highly, highly, important to me in writing stories, to the point of insane detail at times even though that may not appear in the actual story, for much of the reasons described above. Especially in historical fiction, because even something that we would consider benign today might be seen as horrifically uncouth, and that extends even beyond clothing or etiquette. Continuity ties into this, researching the progress of the story itself, and I know I've failed at that a few times in "At the Cabin." (Whose pants are these again in the hallway? lolol) Critical Research Failure is probably my favorite and most frustrating trope, because I get a MST3K-type thrill out of finding inconsistencies at times while other times it's like "A trip to the library would've solved this pretty easily..." Sometimes I think this can go too far to the point where I feel like I'm reading an opinionated textbook rather than a novel, and that defines my love-hate relationship with Stephen Baxter, Neal Stephenson, Isaac Asimov, and Harry Turtledove. There's an author (I cannot think of his name for the life of me) that Stephen King calls in On Writing as basically writing instruction manuals for how things worked, like hotels or airports or cars, that are built around a story. You'd never think that something like that would be entertaining, but he managed to spit out hundreds of books on that formula. I also feel that researching something for the sake of research can generate very good ideas and stunning imagery for a good story. Think of Interstellar, whose lead scientific advisor, co-writer, and executive producer was acclaimed physicist Kip Thorne and the movie has been described as portrayed the most accurate representation of a black hole based on our current understanding of physics. He even managed to base at least one published paper based on the visual effects in the movie, it's amazing. The Science and Entertainment Exchange does this on a larger scale. and consulted on movies like Thor and Watchmen and helped immensely in writing many episodes of Fringe. (Really, Jane Foster from Thor was pretty much conceived by the organization.) Contact was wholly conceived and written by the late great Carl Sagan and I think it's the best story of what would happen if we ever did make contact with aliens, in addition to the underlying and beautiful message of skepticism vs. faith and the emotional response to that. Something like this was one inspiration of the erotophilia in "At the Cabin" in the first place, by looking at chemical signaling in the animal kingdom and ecology in general, and by studying very horrible and terrifying parasites in nature (because I don't want Patzo to have flashbacks, anyone interested in that discussion can look here) Science is often played fast and loose in Hollywood which produces, in my opinion, bad to mediocre results (*cough*Armageddon*cough, cough*) and I think when one can do some research into a few concepts, the best ideas can spring forth. Art and science have always dovetailed beautifully and strangely (Salvador Dali is my favorite artist because of that), and it feeds into the larger lesson of research in telling fantastic stories.
yeah, there have to be some disciplined writers. There should be someone who coordinates, who continues which character. If this is done in a size of up to 40 or 60 people, you should use character sheets (headwords and important things) and a kind of a vita. (kind of a author section) If you want to use "anotherones" character in more than a minor use, you should agree the medium-term developement of the relations with him. I think, its not that hard, because you usually only one or two characters of another writer, so you can talk about your plans. So if you want to get your maid caught from the duke while being intimate with the gardener, you have to ask. Then there would be some ways. First, he thinks, that this incident isnt that important to write about in the dukes branch, but mark it in the dukes character sheet. Second, he want to do a crossthread about the incident from another point of view. Third, he just mentions it in a short way ("Stay away from that maid. She is a slut. I caught getting assfucked by the old gardener!") An introduction to a story should be something, that results in a big change, so imo that would be a good start. But I don't think, that it is necessary to introduce too much. I thinks its more about the environment and atmosphere. It's also not necessary to use all characters. Especially at the beginning of a story.
That's a great point in light of Trugbild's idea. If the story doesn't present every alternate thread as an alternate universe or possibility, having to read every single thread to know exactly what's happened so far is a hefty requirement for participation, especially once it hits a certain length. The pants are a minor example, but that's a great demonstration of how hard it can be to track of details within a single story arc; imagine if you had to respect the events of Vain's threads, too? I'm following Vain's threads, and I know I've contradicted them on at least one occasion. I think that's why it's common to repeat certain details like character appearance in narration; you want to be sure the reader can visualize exactly what you intend so that you can't be misinterpreted in subsequent threads. I generally enjoy Asimov and Turtledove, but I'm more familiar with their short fiction than novels. The form probably keeps their excesses in check! That's the dichotomy I have in mind. Because it is annoying when the narrative is second to showing off how smart you are, and it's definitely the more dangerous possibility in my mind. When I'm writing a historical setting, for instance, I like having a bunch of contemporaneous events and trends influence the backgrounds of my characters, but how much of that does the reader really need to know? Sometimes it feels like I'm just writing, “Look how <PERIOD SETTING> this is!” over and over. But your Stephen King example, building the narrative around a structure or mechanism and how the narrative springs from every step of that? I love things like that. An abundance, even an overwhelming amount of detail can be useful because it invokes a certain emotional response. The fake documents in House of Leaves have footnotes that occupy multiple pages and no other text, literally pages on pages full of tiny font about architectural or film history minutia or what have you, because the character writing them has gone out of his mind. And Kris Straub wrote a short story that doesn't even have a plot, it just demonstrates this machine performing its function. Its creepy, off-putting function that demands absolute secrecy to succeed, and that gets demonstrated on someone who doesn't share your knowledge. (Yes, horror fiction is my touchstone for experimental forms of writing. Gotta keep the reader on their toes!) And then you might miss brilliant, stranger-than-fiction details that fit perfectly but you'd never think of on your own. I'd heard Kip Thorne was an advisor on Interstellar but never read this paper before! That's what I'm afraid of missing out on if I don't dig beyond the headline or the Wikipedia summary. And I guess that's a good point as well: I knew about Carl Sagan and Contact as well, but not what the SEE did for Jane Foster in Thor. Don't feel like your stuff is too trifling to risk an email to someone who knows the subject better than you do. Heh. I just remembered a book festival I attended. At one event a few authors of historical nonfiction were interviewed before an audience, and someone asked them the same question I am now. "How do you know you've done enough research and can begin writing?" And the unanimous answer was, "When my editor calls me in a panic to say my deadline is only X weeks away.” So maybe the answer is to give someone else a calendar and have them scream at me after an arbitrary number of days. Except for that. The Wikipedia summaries on any topic around parasitology is more than enough for me. And the pictures... Seriously though, the erotophilia is interesting because it has those signs rooted in natural phenomena. In a similar vein, I was impressed when art historians figured out that, based on the year Munch claimed to be inspired, The Scream is based on the multicolored sunsets Europe following the Krakatoa eruption.
What I am going to do is detail the setup, characters, house rules in the Story Ideas forum so I get you views on characters etc. I am wary of putting into too much detail for characters than are initially in the background so others can feel freer when their turn to shine comes. I wonder if I should make one of the sons bisexual, and one of the male servants gay as certainly the Between Maid swings both ways. The other famous UK programme from this genre was "Upstairs Downstairs" set in a town house. The most interesting character was the amoral maid Sarah played the Oscar nominated Pauline Collins. She had clearly implied sexual relations with both genders whilst in the house as well as other 'bad' behaviour. She is the kind of person who would feel right at home in our house. The remake also featured a lesbian affair. Victoria Coren, the poker champion, has a series on bohemians on the BBC. In the second programme she kicked off at a life painting class in which she had just drawn a spurting cock and balls, then went on to talk about a conversation between Virginia Woolf, her artist sister and Lytton Strachey about semen ... "the word bugger was never far from our lips." This conversation would have taken place in the 1900s so it might not be a stretch to imagine that the Lord and Lady in our story could have been acquaintances of the Bloomsbury set - he might have been responsible for the original stain if he wan't fictional - bringing up their children in London before moving out to rural Buckinghamshire, home not only of the original Hellfire Club (which is featured in a story I am currently writing) but also the notorious Mitford sisters. Deborah Mitford was the mistress of Chatsworth until last year - it's all connected! Another line from Coren's prog was "Having sex with your sister's quite bohemian."
@Beeble42 -- looking forward to your story idea. Have you had a peep at my story Lucy's Portion? (an admittedly non-researched take on British Gentry x The Help in a Victorianesque setting)
"The ebony box contained an antique ivory dildo and a suede harness " - delicious Notes for writers thread - a very good idea. On my stories I have only used the notes section which is about a paragraph. This gives far more explanation. I might use it in the Hellfire story as well although that might be difficult without giving away the full plot. Before I bothered writing them down, apart from some comedy sci-fi I did at school featuring many of my classmates and teachers and a LOTR type fantasy about 2 young women and 2 young men travelling through various kingdoms, I did used to run through stories in my head and one of them was a D.H.Lawrence story with coal mines, regional accents, extreme poverty and passion up to the max. TBH there was so much dialogue it felt more like a play.
