Musings Before Bedtime

If they don't pay me in royalties, my friends, I think I might be willing to accept payment in the form of homemade butter or cheese. A well-fed writer is less likely to spend pages describing food, I think.

Perhaps aside from the "no grocery shopping while hungry" rule, there needs to be a "no writing while hungry" rule! Abraham Maslow did place the need for food at the bottom of his hierarchy for needs (where the most basic physiological needs were grouped). How can you strive for higher purposes if you're sleepless, thirsty, hungry, and so on?

I write (and work) better when I'm a little hungry, though. Maybe it was conditioning from all those years in graduate school. I suppose you'll have to live with my fixation on describing food in my work. :)

Ren "Hungry" D.

Do I Really Have to Do Research?

Why wouldn't you? Research enriches your story. The details provide color. I don't want my characters to sound exactly like me. I don't want their whole world to be composed of the limited extent of my own existence.

I like to learn. I like to fill my head with interesting tidbits and research factoids.

I don't write to educate, really. The Fracture of a Dream, for instance, is not a textbook or a science book, even though the characters' motivations and behavior are often based on existing empirical research. No, I don't feel like I became a lecturer at any point. However, I do want information in the book to be based on facts when possible.

There were some parts of the book that I didn't want to research in depth, particularly the medical and legal aspects. I knew there were too many ways to get it wrong, and as I said before, I wasn't writing a textbook.

Aside from that, those details were not the focus of the book, and I didn't want to detract from the characters and their relationships in an attempt to be completely factually accurate. Thus, I left things unsaid -- they may happen behind the scenes and are only referenced in conversations with other characters -- or vague. Dek Sundowner is not a doctor, psychologist, or lawyer, for example, so his understanding of matters from those professions is very basic anyway.

Not researching those areas deeply is not a problem, in my opinion. Other details, however -- technology of historical time periods, the sensation or taste of a particular dish, the names of types of flowers or animals -- those can be important. I think they take the story to a new level of reality.

This is why you'll probably never see one of my characters drinking coffee. I refuse to do any research on that beverage. ;)

That's my two cents. What about you, fellow writers? How do you approach research for your works of fiction?

Rendy "Research" Diller

Waiting For You in Dimlos Park

I can't count how many love stories use the dramatic plot point of lovers planning to meet at X location, only for unexpected problems to occur. One of the pair might be late, or perhaps they both arrive but miss each other. Or one of them arrives, breathless and starry-eyed, but at the wrong location. Perhaps, for some reason, one of the pair did not receive the message about their dramatic meeting. Perhaps it was intercepted; perhaps it was lost. Other times, the one of the pair, or both, may have second thoughts about the meeting, and as the seconds tick down, we agonize, with the couple, over whether there will be a happy ending.

These moments happen in real life as well (you laugh, perhaps, but they do!), though when they occur, they tend to be quiet, private. Unobtrusive.

They aren't always meetings in front of glowing fountains, at the top of skyscrapers, or in the middle of street as rain pours down and the lovebirds ignore on-coming traffic. In fact, the moments aren't always between lovers.

It can be a broken promise between friends, a cruel act of betrayal between parent and child. It can be one person reading more meaning into another's words than that person intended. It can be an unlikely dream that shatters in one moment of clarity. That moment of "coming true"...simply wasn't.

I'm really talking more about expectations, rather than the actual act of waiting. One person has expectations, dreams, or hopes, and for some variety of reasons, they are not realized. The message is lost or misunderstood. The people you are depending on don't come through for you. Perhaps a person you trusted didn't feel the same way about you, and you find out too late.

When we wait, we are, of course, expecting something. We don't wait in lines without the intention of doing something or receiving something when we reach the front. We don't sit down to people-watch without expecting people to come along. We don't listen to music over the telephone without wanting to speak to someone at the other end.

In The Fracture of a Dream, Dek Sundowner is waiting under the willow tree in Dimlos Park. What is it? Does he find it?

Ren D.