Research

#5 in an occasional series on writing non fiction

Research is the backbone of the non-fiction book. Even if you are writing your autobiography it is important to get the facts right; for one thing people expecting to be mentioned in your book will be looking eagerly for their name and have their lawyer’s telephone number handy. It applies even if you are writing a work of philosophy or criticism or political thought. Nothing happens in a vacuum, and you will need to read up and reference those other philosophers, critics and political thinkers to highlight which ideas are your own and which have been borrowed or improved.

It is the research within a non-fiction book that gives it enduring value. If you have laboriously read and indexed all of Lady Smithson-Smythe’s letters and diaries, and those of her friends and confidantes you have saved everyone else the job of doing it. There is a fair chance that nobody will ever repeat your toil and therefore your book will stand for all time as the one and only defining work on the subject. That alone makes it valuable, almost independent of how good a writer you are.

Your book may be coming from the heart, from long experience of baking gluten-free cakes or extreme knitting. It is however necessary for you to formalise that experience, make notes, make lists and then cross-check them. You will create in effect a private research archive, perhaps of 200 gluten-free recipes or knitting patterns from which you will eventually discuss 50. This guards against your book being superficial. By being self-critical of the information you are amassing you will be able to distinguish what to include and what to exclude.

It is fine to start writing before your research is complete; I have always done this. Partly it’s the restless urge to get down draft ideas and partly to see that book growing before me. This is not always the most efficient use of time as the early draft will need to be substantially rewritten and parts even deleted once your research is complete. However, it does serve the useful purpose of showing you where the bare patches are or telling you that you already have way too much for one book and it’s time to stop researching.

Primary and Secondary Sources

The most useful non-fiction books are those that make good use of primary sources. This is pure information that has not been processed by anyone else. Examples include the diary of a war veteran, the letters of an elder statesman, photographs you take of lemurs in the wild, line drawings you make of Roman pottery in museums and so forth. Some readers will value your book purely for the presentation of this raw information. I used to churn through heaps of archaeology books in libraries simply looking at the pottery diagrams.

Primary material enables you to build a completely new offering, especially if you are the one who has created the diagrams, photographs or knitting patterns that are at the core of the work. It can be time consuming to go back to original sources rather than hitch a ride on books people have already written, but the result rewards the effort. You can end up with a large archive of information to sift through, put in order then use selectively.

Linda Stratmann, author of The Secret Poisoner offers this advice gleaned from writing her true crime books:

“There is no substitute for studying original contemporary sources, such as research papers, correspondence, and trial transcripts. Experience the events in the words of those who were there, but take nothing for granted and evaluate the material in the light of everything you know about the witness.”

Your book gains voracity from using primary material. Quoting the direct words of that socialist revolutionary from his private journal is far more powerful than paraphrasing them and allows the reader to make up their own mind. A picture is truly worth a thousand words in a work of social history or art history.

Secondary sources can be valuable too. These are publications whose authors have already done the legwork on the primary sources. You may have to rely on these when time is short, for example writing an essay for college, or when your opportunity for work in the field is limited. The primary sources may indeed no longer exist, be very hard for you to access or be written in a language you don’t read. The material could be peripheral to the subject of your book. Say you are writing a family history and come to discuss that uncle who fought at the Battle of Arnhem beside Lt. Colonel Frost. It would be more sensible to cite from the excellent books already written about that battle than start to hunt for original material to describe it.

The pitfall with secondary sources is that the information is second hand. Use enough of them and you can knit together a new narrative. Use too few and you veer towards plagiarism. People already familiar with other books on the subject will be thinking “tell me something new”. You are also hostage to that original author’s accuracy, diligence and prejudice, without knowing what that author has decided to include and what they have cut out. Sometimes your secondary source is themselves citing a secondary source which can become a chain of Chinese whispers. I have seen lines from a WW2 novel cited as an “eye-witness account” by an author who did not take time to understand the context of what they were reading. The internet is a swamp of unverified information and should be used with extreme caution.

A good example of the use of secondary sources is in writing educational material, children’s books, and guidebooks. A lot of complex information needs to be drawn together by the author then presented in a useable format for people not interested in academic pedantry. The delivery of the information is far more important than its originality, although it may be new information to the intended reader. I wrote Occupation to Liberation unapologetically using chiefly secondary sources. It was a short introductory book on the German Occupation of Guernsey 1940-45, and every double page summarised a subject worthy of one or more whole textbooks. The target audience was again the ‘interested non specialist’, particularly tourists for whom the subject was not as familiar as it was to islanders. However, to add value I included many images from Guernsey Museum’s collection that had never previously been published, so amounting to primary information. I was also able to put my personal slant on the subject, particularly the more controversial or obscure parts of the story. Although there were already dozens of books on the German Occupation, the final product was unique.

Researching a book takes time, possibly years, but you will discover things that surprise, delight and possibly horrify you along the way. It can be the most rewarding aspect of writing non-fiction.

Follow this link for more writing tips.

Tales of Mystery and Excavation – follow my adventures, hear about new books and subscriber-only goodies. Sign up to my newsletter by using the form below.