When I saw my assigned topic for today, I chuckled. I’m married to an engineer, and two of my four kids (all of whom are at K-State right now) are engineering students. I could just hear the three of them scoffing, “Why would you research fiction? It’s all made up anyway!”
So, why research fiction? Well, why do we read? I read to learn. Even when I read fiction, I want to learn something. From Dick Francis, it’s steeplechasing and life in Britain. From Louis L’Amour, the Old West. From Tony Hillerman, Navaho life. From Agatha Christie, murder in Merry Olde England. From Lucy Maud Montgomery and Clarence Mulford, life at the turn of the last century. From CJ Box, hunting and law enforcement from the game warden point of view.
From all of them, an appreciation for fantastic prose.
If you write sci-fi or fantasy, maybe you don’t need to do any research. You get to make up all the laws of physics in your universe. Sticking with the old writer’s adage “write what you know,” I mostly write stories set here and now in the American High Plains. My characters are ranchers and cowhands and veterinarians and the other people who make up the fabric of High Plains ranch country. And that doesn’t take much research for me. I know ranchers. I know cowhands. I know veterinarians. I know cows and horses. I know fence-building and hay baling and tractor driving and horse training. So, for a book like The Edge of Society or Stray Murder, there’s not much to research. Most of the details of those books came straight from my imaginator.
So, why research fiction? Because I would rather read a mystery about a retired accountant from Peoria written by a retired accountant from Peoria than read an international spy thriller written by a retired accountant from Peoria. If I wanted drivel, I would turn to Hollywood because Hollywood gets it right every time. Right? Didn’t we all show up here today in a 1956 Chevy pickup truck? Aren’t we all wearing calico dresses and canvas tennies? And don’t we all have a deep southern drawl because we’re not from the Left Coast, the Right Coast, or Chicago?
Every character needs five elements to be believable. They need a physical description, a good side, a bad side, a quirk, and a religion or lack thereof because if I know an actual person very well, I know those five things about that person. So, what is a quirk? It might be a limp or a lisp, a physical handicap or a fear of spiders. It could be anything. And if it’s something about which I know little, I research it.
In Big Claus, the main character is extremely tall. I interviewed several very tall men about things they could tell me that normal sized people just wouldn’t think about. For Poetic Murder, the main character was born deaf. I tapped into friendships with deaf friends. But sometimes, the research goes a little deeper than a few interviews and an internet search.
The two books I spent the most time and energy researching were not Quite Forgotten and A Good Dead. Both included characters I made up when I was in junior high school. Both were stories I thought I could never write because I simply didn’t know enough about the characters to pull it off.
I started writing Strait Arrow in 2017, but Dydd Weller of not Quite Forgotten started bugging me. I emailed my editor and said, “I’m having a little distraction from Strait Arrow.” She said go with it and see what happens.
I knew I didn’t have the experience or worldliness to write this book. But I thought maybe I could pull it off as a short story. So I sent a quick email to one of my dad’s best friends who had served in the navy. I asked how long it takes a ship to cross the Pacific and where it would unload its cargo if it docked somewhere in California.
I hit the Send button, and thirty seconds later, my phone was ringing. I said, “Hello,” and he said, “What are you writing?” I said, “Probably nothing because I don’t know enough about the topic.”
He spent an hour talking to me about ships and shipping. He called the next night and told me another hour’s worth of stories. About this same time, I got an email from an old college friend I had lost track of who said he had discovered my books and was really enjoying them. I recalled he had served in the navy before college and learned he’d gone back in the navy until retirement and then worked as a civilian military intelligence contractor. I asked both men if they would review a short story— they said they would— and sent them the twenty-page draft with one instruction: tell me if the idea is totally ludicrous or if you think I can pull it off.
They both read it and said, “You have to write this story! We’ll help with the details and the research.”
So, I started reading books about POWs from various wars, mostly American POWs in Asian countries. If a single book ever changed my life, it was Surviving Hell by Leo Thorsness. In the Forward, he said, “I’m not writing this book to tell you how awful my captivity was. I’m writing this book so you know whatever problems you have right now are not that bad. Because there’s an old saying: If a man has enough to eat, he has a lot of problems. If he doesn’t, he has only one.”
Another book that affected me was Bury Us Upside Down, co-written by Rick Newman and Don Sheppard. Rick Newman is a journalist and editor with one of the big Chicago newspapers. Don Sheppard is a retired two-star Air Force general who flew in Vietnam with a secret group called the Mistys. The book stands out to me for two reasons. One is, it had a lot of information pertinent to the story I was writing, and two, it was such a clean copy. In over 450 pages of text, I found only two typos. I emailed both authors and, to my delight and shock, they both replied. Rick (consummate editor and perfectionist) replied, “TWO TYPOS? YOU FOUND TWO TYPOS IN MY BOOK? Where were they? I need to know!” Don was nonplussed by typos. He said, “Any publisher will tell you there are twenty typos in any book published since the 1980s.” He also asked if there was anything more I’d like for the research of my book. And he even offered to read the manuscript.
Let me break away for a second on another topic. If you’ve written a book, you already know this, but if you’re writing a book, be warned that it’s tough to find someone to read for you. If you ask ten people to read your book, seven of them will flat out tell you they don’t read. Two will say, “Oh. Well. I guess. Maybe.” And one will say, “You wrote a book?! I’d love to read it!” You’ll never hear from that one again. Of the two who agree to read the book, one might actually do it. You’ll call the other in six months and ask, “Hey, um, did you ever get a chance to read my book?” And they’ll respond, “Oh. Uh. Well, I was going to read it after I finished the, uh. . . Well, I don’t remember where I put it. Could you send it to me again?” Don’t bother. They aren’t going to read it.
In addition to that, NOBODY will read your book twice unless you’re paying them. Most of them don’t even care how you fixed the issue they told you about after they read it once.
If you do find a beta reader, hang on to them! Bake them cookies! Wash their car! My experience is the first time someone gives a book a pre-publication read, they’ll tell me it’s the best book they ever read. The second time, they’ll tell me it’s the best book they ever read. Oh, and there’s a typo on page 47. The third time, they’ll say, “What were you thinking in Chapter 7 when you had that guy jump over the rocks? It was totally out of character for him and didn’t make any sense. Oh, and there were 17 typos.” When they’re willing to hurt your feelings, you’ve got a good beta reader.
Back to not Quite Forgotten. . . I sent the completed manuscript to the two Navy guys and the Air Force general. The Navy guys sent almost identical critiques, mostly procedural things like, “They wouldn’t have saluted in that situation” or “That guy should be a different rank; a person of that rank wouldn’t be doing that job.” But Don Sheppard sent an email that said, “Call me.”
I felt like I’d been summoned to the principal’s office.
I called him, and he asked, “What is your purpose with this book? Is it supposed to be realistic in any way, or is it just fluff?”
I said, “I want it to be as realistic as possible.”
“Then,” he said, “there are two problems. First, the ending is boring. There was great suspense building, and then it just fell flat. And second, the relationship between the military officer in charge of MIA/POW affairs in the US and the Vietnamese police officer is totally bogus. They would be distrustful and suspicious of each other. If they developed any rapport at all, it would only come with time.”
To my immense shock, both Navy guys wanted to read the manuscript again after I made changes. Don agreed to read the parts I’d changed. I also sent a copy to a beta reader who has unfortunately now passed on. She was a speed reader who told me when I asked her to read my first book years earlier that she would miss every single typo and wouldn’t recognized a grammar blip or a wrong verb tense if it bit her on the nose. But she was great at finding holes like, “Hey, what happened to the old lady in Chapter 3? You left her in a coma and never mentioned her again,” or “That scene that started out on Sunday morning ended up on Tuesday afternoon.” Usually after I handed her a manuscript, she’d have comments for me in a day or two. I didn’t hear from her for weeks. So, I called and asked if everything was okay. She said, “I’m not giving it back.”
I said, “Okay. You can keep it. It’s a proof, though, and I’ve fixed a few mistakes in it.”
“I don’t care. I’m not giving it back. I’ve read it four times, and I bawled my face off all four times. And I’m going to read it again. I lost two friends in that war. Don’t change a word of it.”
So, finished with not Quite Forgotten, I was ready to get back to Strait Arrow. Except that I had so much information floating around in my head about POWs that I started thinking about another POW from a different point of view. What about a German captured days after the Normandy Invasion and sent to America? I ran the idea past Mom who is a retired proofreader.
This is a good time to mention that editors and proofreaders are not the same. Editors read for content. They pick up grammar glitches, punctuation problems, character motivation issues, spelling mistakes. Proofreaders make sure the page numbers are sequential and the margins are parallel with the edge of the page. They have their own vocabulary and will start talking about your versos and rectos which seems pretty personal to me. I don’t want to talk about my recto.
When I mentioned this story idea to Mom, she said, “You could set it in Clarinda.”
Clarinda is where we bought groceries and went to church in Southwest Iowa where I grew up. And I squandered many Sunday afternoons at the airport. Dad was a pilot. We had a hangar and air strip at home on the farm, but most Sunday afternoons, Dad and I would go fly, and we often ended up at the Clarinda airport. There were usually a couple old pilots there to swap stories with. And there was a cooler with grape pop.
“Sure,” Mom said. “You should set it in the POW camp there.”
“There was a POW camp in Clarinda? No kidding?” I asked.
“It’s the airport now.”
I was dumbfounded! Mom put me in touch with a retired editor from the publishing company. Dan had compiled a book about the building and operation of Camp Clarinda. His dad had been an electrician on the project, so the author had a few vague childhood memories of construction. The book was out of print, but he agreed to send me a copy by email. It was extremely well written and an easy read. Fortunately, he also asked to read the manuscript which was a real treat. He sent back very precise notes regarding spelling and punctuation errors.
After reading Dan’s book and a year’s worth of The Clarinda Herald-Journal (which really got me up to speed on 1944 egg prices and how many ration coupons you needed to get your tractor tires re-vulcanized), it took three weeks to write The Captured.
So, it was time to get back to Strait Arrow. Except I started thinking about another character. Another of those folks who had been banging around in the attic of my brain since junior high, one who seemed to be saying to me, “Hey! Dydd got his story. I want mine!” I emailed my editor and said, “I have another little distraction problem.”
She said, “Your last distraction led to two books. Run with it.”
Mike Sands is superintendent of a large California school district. He’s a marathon runner. And he’s blind.
Aside from re-reading every Tom Sullivan book and watching Tommy Edison’s YouTube videos, I got in contact with a blind runner in Pennsylvania who was kind enough to spend hours on the phone with me to help me get the details of the story right. I keep in touch with him and his wife. We’ve become good friends.
So, now, back to Strait Arrow. Except. . . I still had all this information about blind people floating around in my head. I emailed one of my editors on a Monday and expressed great frustration that Strait Arrow was back on the back burner because this other stupid idea kept bugging me. She suggested I write the other story and come back to Gabe Strait later.
I sent her the completed manuscript on Thursday. Her email reply was: I thought you meant you were going to write this story. Not that it was already done.
I told her I wrote it between Monday and Thursday, and I had no intention of ever looking at it again. She read it and said it wasn’t really my usual thing. I agreed. She suggested we market it under a pen name and in the genre of Christian Romance. I told her if we were face-to-face, I would slug her for saying the R-word in my presence. But we came up with a quick book cover and sent it to print the following Monday. It was a one-week wonder!
Finally, I got back to work on Strait Arrow which led me to interview a veterinary colleague who had retired as an army pilot— both fixed wing and rotor— and who was more than happy to share a few hours of stories about his flying days.
One other topic. If you don’t recall the eight parts of speech, and maybe you’re a little rusty on participles and antecedents, it might be good to take a refresher on grammar and punctuation. The best instruction I’ve had were from a high school teacher named Mrs. Coulter who nobody liked because she made us diagram sentences. Actually, I found I loved diagramming sentences! It was like applying arithmetic rules to English. It made sense to me in a visual way. My next great instructor was Dr. Jewitt in university Honors Composition. He illuminated the great mythological wonders of the semi-colon. But the very best grammar and usage instruction I got came from homeschooling my kids through 8th grade. If you want to brush up and really learn grammar, I recommend working through all the exercises in Saxon Grammar & Writing 8 or Jensen’s Grammar. Saxon is my favorite because it is incremental, meaning you add a new concept with each lesson and reaffirm previous lessons. Jensen is designed for high schoolers, but if you master it, you will have a better grasp of grammar than the majority of college graduates. Grammar simply isn’t taught in schools anymore. Not even in college. But, if you have to pay an editor to review your manuscript, and the editor can skate right through a pretty clean copy, you might pay for a couple hours of their time at fifty bucks an hour. If that editor has to practically re-write the book because of poor sentence structure, typos, spelling errors, formatting issues, and poor grammar and punctuation, you might pay them for twenty or thirty hours.
