Anne here, and that's a slightly misleading heading — I'm not bedridden or about to talk about naughty things or anything, I just research from my bed, using my laptop, quite often. It could just as easily take place in my writing room on the main computer. But right now I'm writing this post from my bed, so . . .
And I'm answering a question someone sent me privately, about doing research from the other side of the world.
I have huge envy of the wenches who can hop in a car and visit potential settings, or even those who can hop on a plane. I could hop on a plane, too, of course (though not currently with our CoVid restrictions), and have, often — the photo on the right is mine from my last UK trip. But a round trip to the UK costs me several thousand dollars, and believe me, sitting in a plane for 23 hours (one way) is no fun — and that's just to get there. In any case, with CoVid, travel is a whole other set of problems, not the least of which is the requirement to be quarantined for 10 days on arrival in the UK, and 2 weeks of quarantine on returning home.
Before I became a writer, I'd travelled quite a bit—in fact I was traveling in North America, the UK, Europe and Asia when I first decided to try to write for a living. And I'd visited the UK several times and lived in Scotland for a year as a child.
But I was absorbing the sights and sounds and smells as a traveller, not a writer. I toured museums and fabulous old houses for the love of history and fine old houses, not with a view to setting a scene in one of them, or having a character live in them. I wrote plenty of letters, but took no writerly notes.
So for me, most of the time, it has to be virtual research.
When I first started writing fiction, most of my research came from books. I grew up reading fiction, like Austen and Heyer and others who gave me a feeling for the times. But for settings and historical background and so on, it was mostly books from my local library. When I started writing the internet was in its infancy.Still my library was pretty good, and I was able to borrow detailed military histories, and the history of underclothes, and other excellent histories. But my favorites were often published diaries — some of which I borrowed on inter-library loan from my State Library — that's it in the photo above left.
I loved reading primary sources — travelers' diaries, or collections of letters, in which the writer gave their impressions, not just of the localities they were visiting, but also their views of the local culture, and the people they met, or sometimes it was just a recounting of their day-to-day life and their concerns. All of which was wonderful source material for a writer.
These days these letters and diaries and many more are available on-line, which is such a boon to researchers and writers. I was able to access quite a few on-line diaries for my book set partly in Egypt. The same with my book set in post-Napoleonic Spain, though some I used were written during the war. And I accessed blogs on traditional local foods and so on as well.
I also collect maps of localities, and scour the internet for photos of the places I want my characters to be, paying particular attention to photos or paintings with the atmosphere I'm after. I invent houses for my characters based on a combination of houses I found on the web.
Then again, not all research has to be in "hard copy". Sometimes, I will lie down on my bed, close my eyes and simply imagine myself into a scene or a place, trying to imagine the sounds and the smells. If I want to set a scene in a maze, for instance, I can close my eyes and recall the tall, dense hedges that I played in and around as a child. Or I'll pick a sprig of yew or cypress and the smell will take me right back.
If I want a snow scene, I'll recall my time in the mountains of Greece in winter, and the squeaking sound my shoes made in the snow, and how the smell of the vegetation beneath the snow came up so fresh and bearing the scent of summer. And of how a clear animal print outline in the snow meant it was relatively old, whereas a crumbly one was really fresh. (One day I'll tell you the story of how we slid down a steep mountainside on our bums after we saw really fresh bear prints and saw (and heard) the bear above us.)
And eventually all of these various scraps and snippets and random threads come together in the crucible of the imagination and voila, a story world emerges. And that, dear readers, is how research can be done from almost anywhere.
Did any of this surprise you? If you could travel anywhere for research or just for fun, where would you go?