We were talking with a friend this evening, whose partner was off for the second week of her bowling league. Every Tuesday night for thirty weeks. Nora said, “that’s why your writing course is going from fall through spring, right? Old habits die hard.”
We talk a lot about “doing the research for a book,” but I think we mean several different things when we say that. I’ll give you some examples.
My most recent book was set in the contemporary world, so I didn’t have to go back in time and try to figure out who was President or what might have been on the radio. I didn’t have to recreate world affairs or natural disasters.
The story was, however, set in a different place. Specifically, the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, commonly known as the U. P. I went to college in the U. P. between 1976 and 1978, driving through that remarkably unpopulated landscape four times a year. The U. P. is about twice the size of Vermont, and has fewer than half as many people. The biggest city, Marquette, is just barely larger than Rutland. The U. P. has a mythological place in my mind, a colony of Detroit and Boston that shipped out all of its raw materials (iron ore, copper ore, timber, and smart children) only to get nearly nothing in return.
I don’t live in the U. P., and I haven’t been there for decades. So I had some work to do: driving around Alger County on Google Maps Street View, for instance, or looking up the County’s governmental structure. Finding out whether the former prominence of Finnish and Welsh family names still held, finding out how far one would have to drive to buy a new car or a new snowmobile. Learning where the hospital would be, learning where the schools would be, learning how long it would take to drive to Shingleton, or to Marquette, or to the Mackinac Bridge. Learning how to pronounce cudighi, the U. P.’s unofficial official sandwich. Those are all examples of one kind of research, the sort of factual things that make a place or a job feel realistic. They are necessary—we’re not allowed to get those wrong. But they’re far from sufficient.
There’s other research that we do all day every day; we live around people and see how they dress, listen to how they talk. The imaginary town of Cornwall, Michigan is the same size as the real-world town of Middletown Springs. That means some things for everyday life: about gossip at the general store and the dump, about grudges held and about alliances strengthened. Rural life everywhere is filled with second-guessing, because rural people all have to do a lot of things well enough rather than a few things really well. So lots of guys have built a garage or graveled their driveway, and they think they know how to do it. That means everybody else is wrong. (Nora and I joke that the Vermont state motto should be “Huh… don’t know that I’d have done it THAT way…”) Same is true for pie crusts, quilts, engine repair, gardening… there’s just endless commentary about other people and their errors. Because really, in a town of 800 people, what else is there to talk about?
All of that is important, but still falls a little shy of the kind of research that I love most.
I was about to write a scene in which our protagonist Angie was asked to look over a crime site—her boyfriend’s summer cabin that had been taken over for winter use as a combination of meth lab and housing. I’ve never been in a meth lab. I don’t know what that looks like. I know it’s not clean science, like a hospital lab; it’s poor people, poorly educated, who are trying to make a dangerous product without much infrastructure. So I googled “meth lab,” and chose “images,” and saw this.
What a remarkably rich portrait of shattered lives. The clutter, the trash. The stained walls. The plastic tubing running into and out of plastic bottles, the propane tank and the cooler. The scale. The single rubber glove draped over the edge of the sink. The deer rifle propped against the counter. The fucking teddy bear, and the same colors on the onesie on the chair next to it.
That’s what the research was for. To let me live in it. To let me understand not merely the technical facts but the despair. The research was all about experiential understanding. And it became this.
Once Sunday came, Angie met Kate at the shop, then drove out to meet the State Police at Grant’s cabin. Given that the house was a crime scene, they had to come to agreement out in the snow about what they could and couldn’t touch, where they could and couldn’t walk.
As they were about to go up the stairs to the deck, Kate said, “You ready for this? It’s probably going to feel pretty ugly.”
“No, I ain’t ready, but we’re gonna do it anyway. Let’s go.” The trooper slid the patio door open, and Kate walked in, Angie right behind.
The curtains were all torn down and had been used as blankets, draped all over the couch and wadded into the arms of chairs. Bed pillows and couch pillows and stuffed animals alike had been pressed into dormitory service. The toolbox and chainsaw from the truck were up against the kitchen counter, the handgun and radio next to the sink.
The breakfast table had been pushed up against the wall. On it, a Blue Rhino propane tank, an ice chest, and plastic tubing running back and forth between them, the wallpaper and ceiling above it scorched and smoke-stained. A deer rifle propped against the counter. A plastic bale of Walmart house-brand diapers, sized for six- to twelve-month-olds, on the floor next to it.
Trash everywhere. On the floors, on the furniture, on the counters, spilling out of the lower cupboards. Empty cans for soup and beer alike. Dirty clothes, infant through adult, a Goodwill dumpster of ragged clothes and boots and sneakers and slippers.
All of this, where Angie and Grant had had their fill of one another every day and night for the past few summers.
She hadn’t walked ten feet, but couldn’t bear any more, turned and walked back outdoors. She felt colder than she had after her rescue, but a different kind, the cold that comes from a familiar story replaced by something obscene. Kate came out to join her. “Come on, let’s go.” She walked Angie out to the one-ton, put her into the passenger seat and drove away.
And then, what Angie had seen haunted her through the rest of the day:
Angie and the crew went about their workdays, prepping for the afternoon snow, clearing a couple of frozen culverts to clear an ice wash over a back road, and then out with all three plow trucks until about eight in the evening. But the normal shop banter didn’t lift her mood for more than a few seconds. Her usual ability to be present, to see every leaf and every reflector and every visitor in a driveway, was hampered by the visual aura of that cabin. Of the lives that it represented. Which one of those young men had been the captain of the football team, the lead of the school play? Which one of those young women had been aiming to be a high school science teacher like Betsy? And what would become of a baby born to that home? How could any child climb from that hole, a hole that it had no responsibility for digging? A hole that was its only birthright?
We care about our characters, so it’s crucial that we really understand what it’s like to live that way. So an awful lot of my research is on the fly, scene by scene and day by day. What do I need to know in order to understand this moment? It’s research about the way people live, far more than about the nature of the fabrics they wore or the members of their favorite TV show. The research isn’t done to show OUR authority as writers; it’s to give us a better sense of the inner lives of our characters, to give THEM the density and authority that readers need in order to care about them.
Herb Childress 