The Role of Research in the Art of Fiction & Novel Writing

One reason I started writing fiction was to avoid research. It wasn’t long before I realized that research is an essential tool and skill required for all writing, including and perhaps especially novel writing.

But what is the role of research in fiction, particularly the art of it?

One problem most, if not all, fiction writers and novelists encounter is how to depict a difficult scene where what is happening is illegal, immoral, offensive. How does the writer present the reality, its causes, and its effects, especially when research only underscores that what is happening is wrong?

One role of research is to inform the reality, the verisimilitude, of a scene, a story, the characters. Why are they doing what they’re doing? Where and how did their current actions originate? What caused them? What will their outcome be? But what happens when research only serves to underscore that the scene we are depicting will be difficult, even off-putting, for the audience?

One option might be to discard research altogether and simply write the scene. But when research is viewed as subordinate to and supportive of fiction, particularly the novel, it can do more for the writer than simply provide information. In order to create fiction, even long-form fiction at the level of art, research can inform the writer, the story and the characters. But research must not dictate the characters or the story. Nor should research dictate art.

Rather, one intention of art is to reflect the reality of the world and to elevate and underscore the truth of that reality, in all its beauty and ugliness.

As the Japanese filmmaker and painter Akira Kurosawa has said, “To be an artist means to search, to find and look at these realities. To be an artist means to never look away.”

A difficult subject or story, or difficult characters, are not sufficient cause in themselves to discard their darker side. For one role of art is to say, “This is what is.”

This does not mean that the writer, the artist, should pander to the senses, the desire for stimulation. What it does mean is making use of both light and darkness in our stories and the people in them, as painters such as Caravaggio and Vermeer have done.

The necessary outcome of the use of light and shadow back to back, the chiaroscuro effect, is precisely that we cannot see the extent of darkness unless light is right alongside it, nor can we see the extent of light unless darkness is right alongside it.