Many authors get asked how they research for their novels, especially authors of historical fiction. Hear from Patricia Raybon, author of the Annalee Spain series which is set in 1920s Denver, about how she answers this question from readers.
I’m visiting a book club, and before the meeting ends, I can predict a recurring question. How do I research my historical fiction? I’ve pondered my answer often, recently during a phone call after the recent solar eclipse. My granddaughter was calling from Dallas, still watching the sky with friends, all wearing protective glasses, huddled on the top floor of her work building’s parking garage to see the spectacle.
“Oh, my gosh!” I could make out her amazed voice on the video she recorded. “Look at the moon! The edge is purple! Oh, my gosh! The moon! The edge is orange!”
A second later, as the moon totally eclipsed the sun, she and her work pals started screaming, marveling at the big black orb in the sky as it blocked out the sun, turning the day into dark except for occasional pulses of ringed, fiery light.
Was the sight as exciting as she expected? “Much more,” she told me later. “I wasn’t sure what I’d see but, oh my gosh, it was totally amazing.”
That’s how I felt, totally amazed that at such an extraordinary moment, she decided to call me, letting me take part.
The experience reminded me that researching a novel is not just sitting in a hushed library plowing through old records. Doing research means paying attention to life and living it. Thus, it’s being connected to people not because you have a book to write, but because you love them, and they know it, so you’re journeying together.
Ernest Hemingway, the famed 20th Century novelist, put it this way: “In order to write about life first you must live it.”
I pondered such things the next day, recalling a scene in Truth Be Told, my new Annalee Spain Mystery novel. It’s nearing midnight in the scene, and amateur sleuth Annalee is curled on her tiny front porch with an important person in her life. They’re gazing up at the vast, dark sky when a flash of meteors blazes across the heavens, leaving a sparkling trail of burning neon green.
The shooting stars seem to invoke tender, brave questions from the two. Who are they and what will they do in life together?
But I didn’t have to research their glowing sky. I saw it firsthand one late night as my husband and I drove home from a festive wedding in rural, northern Colorado. The bride and groom weren’t close friends. They’re friends of our younger daughter who, as some know, has left the church for another faith. We love our daughter, however, and after praying countless prayers and struggling many years, we do what the Lord has counseled: Trust Me and love her.
Thus, Dan and I piled in our car and, at her request, drove with her family to her friend’s wedding. We stayed long and late, getting hugged and thanked by people speaking languages we didn’t know and offering food we’d never eaten—the bride and groom feted in a farm town with more cows than people.
It was nearing midnight when we piled in our frigid car for the long drive home. A country road at midnight is a long, black ribbon lit only by stars and hope that you’ll soon find the main road.
So, we felt miles from nowhere when, in all that blackness, a burst of spiraling, neon green fire blazed past the road in front of us, lighting up the atmosphere, sizzling and spitting as it raged passed. Instantly, another blazing burst followed. Suddenly all in the car started to scream: “Meteors!”
We believed anyway that’s what we’d seen and heard—the flash, then a crackle and pop of bacon frying in a pan, which scientists who study meteors call a “photoacoustic effect.”
Intriguing. But I doubt I would’ve known to research such a moment or weave shooting stars into my fiction if I hadn’t agreed to attend a young woman’s wedding with my beautiful, complex daughter and seen the light.
That, as I told the book club, is where a novelist’s research starts. Not in a book. In the author’s heart. The result? The author thanks God for a burning, bright story. Then may it shine.
