Research, What?

I played around (swiftly, and in my mind) with putting the comma in that title. It really could go both ways. See, I started writing fantasy because I didn't want to do the research necessary to write military fiction like Tom Clancy. I didn't want to do research at all -- and in fantasy, the question may be: "Research what?"

And, for a long time, that worked. I had an itinerant love for the medieval period, so I had a basic working knowledge of castles and swords and knights and the like; and dragons and other beasties are easy to write in. If I had to write combat, I did what I could and made the rest difficult to follow.
I just used a lot of general terms, like "the blades whirled and danced" -- that doesn't need to get into specific turns of the wrist and lunges, or anything like that. Neither I nor the reader need to have practiced sword-fighting to loosely imagine a sword-fight -- any good fantasy or action movie can probably give us enough of a visual to imagine it later.

But then I was reading Robert Jordan, and he mentioned dampness damaging one of his character's bowstring. I frowned to myself, and made sure to keep that in mind should my character's bowstring ever get caught in the rain. Then I noticed upon watching the night sky that the moon doesn't always come up at the same time every night -- sometimes it comes up in early evening, sometimes after midnight. So I had to keep in mind where the sun would be in relation to the moon for what kind of phase it had, and make sure a crescent moon didn't rise at dusk. Then I read somewhere that the command: "Fire!" -- except when enflaming the point of an arrow -- would not have existed until matchlock rifles. So I made sure to fix any instance of that in my novel.

But then I wondered what kind of noise a wind-driven flour-mill might make -- if I were to set one outside one of the villages -- and I realized I only had assumptions on how flour-mills worked. I was familiar (for the most part) with mill-stones, and obviously it turned somehow, driven by the wind and the blades. But I didn't know anything else. So I went on to Wikipedia and looked it up. It actually took linking to a few different pages before I finally found one that actually explained the milling process -- and I learned, much to my surprise, that  there are two millstones (and actually generally four): one stationary on the bottom, the other spinning and marked with scissoring lines that actually grinds the wheat into flour. Amazing!

Then I sat back, realized what I'd done, and thought: "Research? What?"

If you want any amount of realism in your story, odds are fantastic that you will need to do some research. Some of it may come naturally: if you have an inquisitive mind, and read a lot, you will find bits of information everywhere that you can store away for future use.

(Just yesterday, a book I had to read for composition class contained an excerpt concerning weather fronts. It was a fiction piece, and was written prosaically, but it gave me insight into one very cool way that storms can come upon the ocean. And I knew I could use it in an upcoming short story.)

Often, though, you'll need to know something specific and you won't be able to wait for it to come along naturally -- you'll have to go out and look for it. Academic types call this "research." I don't have a succinct name for it, but I find it more fun than the dreary academic research. It's a more purified form of learning -- learning that is stripped of the stigma gained by years of mandatory education; learning that is gaining knowledge, that is pure and simple acquisition of truth. If I am tested on it, it is only because my readers might catch me writing about what I don't know. And I like it.

See you Monday.