Every single writer knows that every new novel is a new learning experience. It doesn't matter what genre you're writing in, you're going to have to do at least a modicum of research, even if you're already an expert in the field you're writing in: for period pieces you'll need to know about clothing and customs, for procedural police dramas you'll need to know how a crime scene is set up and what forensics teams do, et cetera.
For new writers, it might not seem like a lot of research needs to go into a book. You would be wrong to assume that. Even a relatively simple concept requires a great deal of attention to detail. And while you can certainly take poetic license with a few items to keep the suspense going, you need to stay in reality as much as possible (unless you're doing some zany comedy or the like) so that when you do take a little license, the reader will go along with it.
In case you're new to writing, or in case you've been doing it for a while and aren't quite sure why your stories seem to lack verisimilitude, I'm going to give you a step-by-step on how I go about creating realism. I'll start by briefly discussing my latest work, how simple it seemed initially, and what I discovered/learned as I went along.
In my new book, Psycho Save Us, two young black girls with a gift for telepathy are abducted off the streets of Atlanta, in an area called the Bluff (which is a real, crime-ridden area) by a group of vicious human traffickers and child pornographers called the Rainbow Room, and their only hope is Spencer Pelletier, a career criminal and psychopath recently escaped from Leavenworth Penitentiary, who can mysteriously detect them remotely by their telepathic link, and who is being pursued by Atlanta PD Detective Leon Hulsey and FBI Special Agent Jamal Porter.
Now, right there, you can see that there is a whole slew of research that needs to be done. I had a one-up having taught self-defense to law enforcement, including SWAT and detectives, and therefore had a resource to interview a few of them on how they go about their jobs, but the rest was quite beyond my purview.
So, what did I do? Well, I'll tell you.
STEP 1 - Keep a Library of Non-Fiction, and Read Books on True Crime
Even though the two girls' telepathic link make this a kind of supernatural tale, I was still dealing wiht a very mature, real-world setting. Since I was going to be writing about crime, law enforcement, and the relationship between the two, I had to go to a few non-fiction sources. I have a library of such books, such as The Hot House by Pete Earley, which describes life inside Leavenworth Penitentiary, and Courtroom 302 by Steve Bogira, which was a valuable resource for seeing how criminals are processed once captured, how judges and lawyers hammer out a plea bargain behind the scenes, and how detectives and police behave when it's time to testify.
Writers need a library on non-fiction so that they remain informed, and not just with up-to-date information, but also with outmoded investigative techniques. This will help add color to your stories. For instance, while researching for Psycho Save Us, I discovered that modern police have stopped relying so much on the AMBER alert system because, as it happens, there's never been a single confirmed account of a child that was found directly as the result of an AMBER alert. By mentioning this to the reader through a single line of dialogue, the reader now realizes that the Atlanta Police Department actually have one less tool than they probably thought they had, and the two kidnapped girls, Kaley and Shala, are in an even more desperate situation.
The reader knows this now: Missing black children aren't talked about in the media as much as whites, especially those in impoverished neighborhoods, and AMBER alerts don't work?!
Tension increased ever so slightly.
The Bluff is a real place in Atlanta, and is home to some of the most crime-ridden stations in America. However, recent efforts by the city to revitalize the community has cleaned it up a little. Through my research, I was able to determine the feel of the area, get an idea of what roads intersected with which, and, since I live outside of Atlanta, I dared to drive through it a bit, and found only a portion as rundown as I describe in my book. But that's exactly my point: by doing the research, I found the "scummy" areas and embellished a bit, spreading that scumminess over a wider area, creating a more menacing feel.
The Rainbow Room is based off of an actual group of traffickers and child pornographers that you can read about in my article from last month. I read about this group in a CNN article about two years ago. (Be careful how you search groups like these, you don't want anyone getting the wrong idea about your interest.) For a group of disgusting monsters, their methods are precise, even impressive, and I found a few more details about them on Wikipedia (that's right, Wikipedia).
As for Spencer Pelletier, the character himself grew out of reading I had done on psychopaths, and how very disturbing and even intriguing they can be as people. I learned some fascinating things about them. For instance, did you know that most psychopaths never kill? They live among us, and there's about one in every two hundred people. And they are terrific liars.
So the lesson is this: Read often. Read textbooks. Buy The Merck Manual of Medical Information and thumb through it, read about a random disease, its symptoms, and what sort of people are affected. Buy a book on psychology, read just one chapter a day, and learn about different mental afflictions. Go online and read how lock-picking works, how to hotwire a car, and how Ponzi schemes work. Absorb this information, take notes if you have to, arm yourself with that knowledge, and then proceed to Step 2.
STEP 2 - Arranging the Notes
Open a Word file that has the title of your book and the word "notes" as its title. For instance, I labeled the file for notes for Psycho Save Us as "psychoNotes." I created a page for each major category, from character descriptions and backgrounds (lest I forget later that Detective Hulsey was a former amateur bodybuilder that almost went pro), to important procedures that my detectives must follow next.
Since Psycho Save Us takes place in one night over a nine-hour period, I also kept a running timeline, so that I knew what time it was at the beginning of every chapter. (This is important if you want to increase tension steadily, have it rising and rising the way books like The Da Vinci Code are able to pull off.) This will also allow you to mete out the information from your research over time, instead of all at once, boring your reader. (Personally, I put every nugget of information that I've used in BOLD LETTERS after I've copied and pasted it into my main novel document, so that I know I've used it.)
STEP 3 - Learning as I Go
You can't learn everything up front. As some famous guy once said, "If everyone waited until they were a hundred percent ready to get started, nobody would ever start." I'm sure I screwed that quote up, but you get the idea.
You want to learn as much as you can about the areas you're going to be writing about, but don't get so bogged down in details that you get burnt out and never start. You need to work on the story while the fire is still burning in your heart. So, start your story, and your preliminary research ought to get you through the beginning. Whenever you come up against a brick wall, you ought to be able to pause for a bit and work it out through more research.
Doing this might require some reworking, maybe even a little backtracking. Or, it might wait until you're absolutely finished with your rough draft, and then you can go through with your rewrite and change some things around a bit.
This process is often rewarding. For instance, I was just writing right along with Psycho Save Us until I came to a portion where Spencer was hunting one of the members of the Rainbow Room named Dmitry, but all he had to go on was a first name and a red bear claw tattoo on Dmitry's arm. Spencer is on the run himself, so he can't go to the police. So, how could he find this person? I thought, Spencer could probably just call the parole office and find this person.
But how should that conversation go, so that Spencer remains anonymous? Surely they'll ask for his name when he calls.
I went to a friend of mine who was a former policeman and parole officer, and asked him what Spencer ought to say in order to remain unsuspicious. He said, "Have your character call the Parole Commission in Valdosta. Have him just make up a name for himself, and have him tell the parole office that he got hit by this Dmitry guy in traffic, but all he has to go on is this tattoo and a first name. They keep records of physical descriptions, like tattoos and stuff. Shouldn't be too hard to run a search on a guy with the first name Dmitry and a red bear claw tattoo on his arm."
The things you learn as a writer.
STEP 4 - Let Some of the Professional People You Interviewed Read Your Book
It's important that once you're finished--or even before you're finished if you want--you hand your work over to people who know what they're talking about, have them read it, and listen to their feedback. And listen closely! They will have some feedback on how unrealistic this part is, or that part.
DON'T PANIC!
There is no book, movie, or TV show that's 100% accurate. You can get away with a few exaggerations. What you want to determine is whether or not you should make the changes, and if you don't will it "break" your novel? Sometimes, police officers are so rigid about their work that they are a little too hard on works like this. I received one (and only one) minor little piece of criticism from one of my officer pals when I described to him what I intended to do with the story, and even after he told me a police detective probably wouldn't do that, I had my character do that anyway. And do you know what? So far, no civilians have noticed a thing.
This is a careful "weighing" moment for your book. What do you keep uber-realistic, and what do you let ride? Ultimately, that will be decided between you and your editor.
So, as Forrest Gump used to say, "That's all I got to say about that."
Oh! And I also learned that way, WAY more prisoners escape prison each year than you would probably believe, and the scary part...sometimes they just walk out the front door. Happens more than you'd think.
Buy Psycho Save Us on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Psycho-Save-Us-ebook/dp/B009DL5WEQ/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1348353493&sr=8-1&keywords=psycho+save+us
Follow me on Twitter and Facebook: Twitter account ChadRyanHuskins
Visit my website: www.forestofideas.com
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