Approaching Experts for Help with Research

By Marilyn Forsyth

Image courtesy of giphy

So, you’ve got an idea for a story with, let’s say, a paramedic as your heroine. It’s the perfect career for the feisty but compassionate female character you have in mind, but it’s also a job you have zero knowledge of.


Where do you look for the information you’re going to need to add authenticity to this character?


The internet is the obvious place for background knowledge. But you don’t want just general stuff, you want job-specific info—the nitty gritty details, the day to day realities that will make your character and her experiences come to life on the page.

Image courtesy of learning.bmj.com

You need an EXPERT to answer the myriad questions burning your brain. Questions like: what are you thinking as you weave an ambulance through heavy traffic? How do you insert a canula? What do you say to a patient who believes they’re about to die?

This is the scenario I faced with my work-in-progress.

Rather than ask those questions on a site like QUORA (and hope the answers come from a ridgy-didge medico) or emailing the local ambulance station, I opted to make contact with the sister of a guy in my sons’ footy team who works as a paramedic.

Image courtesy of someeecards

Being a bit of an introvert, I was apprehensive about approaching her at a social function but the lovely Carol was happy to meet with me over coffee. Since then, her ongoing help has been invaluable in keeping the medical aspect of my story believable. (Apparently she got quite a few laughs from my sketchy medical knowledge in my early drafts.)





On my recent research trip to Wales, I again pulled on my big girl panties to request help. My Aussie heroine belongs to a Welsh Hazardous Area Response Team. After contacting the HART at Bridgend (near Cardiff), I was invited to visit the base and given a tour of the facility by Dai, the Training Manager. Not only that, but the next day I was fortunate enough to spend the morning with a group of HART operatives training for water rescues at a white-water rafting centre.

So much fun! Not only watching the procedures, but also interacting with the team. And talking with the team members has given me a great insight into the types of characters who make this job their life. All excellent fodder for my book.


In the past, I’ve contacted people by email or phone to ask questions—the researchers at the National Library of Wales, an opal dealer from Melbourne, a guide from a pearl farm—but nothing beats that personal contact.


So, here are some things I’ve learned about approaching experts for help with research:

• People passionate about their job/interests are more than happy to share their knowledge.
• Be brief and straightforward in stating your reason for the research.
• Prepare your questions beforehand, and only ask what you can’t find out for yourself elsewhere.
• Make notes as you go (or record any interviews), and take photos (with permission, of course).
• Show your gratitude by mentioning them by name in your Acknowledgements.
• Let them know when the book is published.

The handsome HART heroes (from left): Keith, Dom, Gavin, Martyn, Craig.

Approaching people in person isn’t easy (for me, anyway) but the rewards of direct contact with an expert, as I discovered, are astronomical!

Do you have any stories about asking an expert for help with your book? I’d love to hear them!

Love to Love getting together with my crit partners once a month to discuss all things writing.❤

Love to Laugh at the silliest things. Something doing the rounds recently on Facebook was to post your name replacing every vowel with 'oodle', so my name came out as Moodleroodleloodlen. Go on, do it! It's fun. 😄

Love to Learn how to improve my craft, which is why I'll be attending the 2018 RWAus Conference in Sydney in August.

The Truth About Characters by Anne Gracie

Creating Convincing Characters

Sharon asked me about the challenges of creating convincing characters from a particular time period for my historical romances.

The key to this is, I think, audience. My audience is a modern day audience, and they're the ones I have to convince. Whether my Regency-era characters would be convincing to people of that time is another matter.

Research

I don't do masses of research for every book — it depends on the setting and the circumstances in which my story is to take place. But I do read a fair bit of history. My favourite historical research comes from reading diaries and letters written during the time my books are set.

People reveal themselves so wonderfully in personal, not-for-publication writing — attitudes, mores, personality quirks, assumptions about the world — and that influences my writing. And makes my characters more historical, I hope.

from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Wellesley._1st_Duke_of_Wellington

Think Of Your Reader

But the truth is, if you make a story too historically authentic, it becomes a little inaccessible to modern-day readers. It's like speech. I studied linguistics many years ago, and we made lots of transcriptions of ordinary people speaking. If any writer used those as dialogue, readers would soon be tossing the book at the wall. Real speech is messy and disjointed and often hard to follow when written down. Dialogue in books is constructed to feel authentic, but in fact it's not. It prunes out the repetition, the meandering, the ums and the ers and the y'knows, and becomes crisp and precise. Which is part of the delight in reading good dialogue.

Historical characters and settings and stories are the same. They have to feel real to modern-day readers, but if you flood the reader with masses of authentic detail it can distract from the story. We want a taste of historical lusciousness, of that different-yet-familiar world, but not the whole confusing plunge-in sensaround experience.

from https://hartonginternational.com/

When I come to creating historical characters, I don't see them as all that different from people today — people don't change much — it's how their circumstances, their environment and their society impacts on them that matters. It's those things that help shape their characters.

So to make modern-day audience understand the particular forces that have helped shape my characters, I might show them at different moments in their lives — the moments that helped shape them. We all have those moments — our first encounter with death, or loss, various realizations in our pathway to adulthood.

When readers experience those moments through the eyes or memories of a character, they understand much more about who the characters are and how they have been shaped by their lives. It's one of the things that most fascinates me as a writer — learning why my characters are the way they are, discovering the secrets they have bottled up, and the uncomfortable or painful truths they've been trying to hide from for so much of their lives.

from www.penguinrandomhouse.com

Know Your Characters

I don't think of my characters as people I've "made up." It's more like they're people living in my head, and they're as stubborn and reclusive and difficult as real people are. It's only through putting them on the paper, tossing them into difficult situations and digging deep that I discover their secrets, and it often comes as a surprise to me — an insight like a bolt from the blue. An "Oh, that's why he won't do x or hates y," kind of thing.

It's one of the things I love about writing.

I love to love — love is what makes everything else worthwhile. I love to laugh, which is a good thing, as people and dogs are endlessly funny. I love to learn, because how exciting to know there's always something new to look forward to.