Verisimilitude and the Competent Con: Research for Fiction

by Hanne Blank

"The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shockproof crap detector. This is the writer's radar and all great writers have had it."
- Ernest Hemingway

Writers are prone to slinging bullshit. It's an occupational hazard. "Write what you know" only gets you so far, particularly when you're writing speculative fiction. Inevitably, you will come to the limits of what you have personally experienced or know as a matter of prior education. That's where the artistic license to invent detail - also known as slinging bullshit - begins.

But not just any old bullshit will do. Our bullshit has to be interesting, naturally, and well-written if at all possible, but most of all it must be believable.

Bullshit that is not believable is just crap. Crap is the stuff that makes people throw books across the room halfway through, screaming "This is crap! This writer is an idiot!" Crap is the bit of yarn that dangles from the hem of the literary sweater-the famously improbable chronology in The Great Gatsby that would've had Daisy's mother nine months pregnant at the altar, for example, but also the troublesome physics in Stephen R. Donaldson's early Gap books that, as he later put it, would've left his characters as "greasy smears on the bulkhead" if they'd been real human beings-that makes at least some readers pause to yank on it. One good tug can be all it takes to make a whole story unravel.

Good bullshitting, on the other hand, makes things tighter and sturdier. It draws us in. It fills in the details that help us trust the writer and everything the writer creates, from psychology to physics. It is invented-it is not real, it is, in a word, bullshit-but it provides the kinds of touchstones we look to for our sense of how things are supposed to work and be. In fiction, it is what makes the air breathable, the transportation functional, the clothing wearable, the food edible, and the interactions between people intelligible. It is what makes the universe of a story make sense to us.

The name we use for this quality is verisimilitude. From the Latin veri similis, "truth-like," it is the quality of being perceived as being real. The knack for verisimilitude-the ability to generate high-quality bullshit-is partly pure talent. There are people who are literally incapable of lying, and there are professional con men who can sell oceanfront properties in Kansas to the cop working the polygraph.

Writers are not con artists. But a writer's success--just like a con artist's--is dependent on whether or not someone swallows the story. Thinking about fiction and verisimilitude in terms of "bullshit" and "crap." neatly slices out "artistic vision" and the other excuses we sometimes allow ourselves. Looking at it as a question of successful bullshitting lets us refuse to waste time and go straight to the bottom-line: Does It Do What Needs To Be Done To Get The Reader To Buy Your Game - Or Is It Just Crap?

Talent helps in this as in every other aspect of writing. But it isn't everything. Generating bullshit that works, rather than crap that doesn't, requires knowledge. Specifically, it requires knowledge of detail. Verisimilitude in fiction depends only rarely on the big picture and constantly on the small one. The line in Matthew 23, in which Jesus castigates the blind guides who "strain at a gnat, and swallow a camel," neatly encapsulates this paradoxical truth.

As readers, and particularly as readers of speculative fiction, we are good at accepting even the most outrageous precepts-telepathic symbiosis between species, independently sentient androids, honest government officials-and being entirely willing to believe that they are "real," at least within the finite boundaries of a particular story or fictional universe. Put your story on a desert planet, on an alternate Earth with a very different geopolitics, on a military starship whose mission is to go where no man has gone before. Populate it with magic-wielding schoolboys, telepathic dragons, or triplebreasted whores from Eroticon 6. Indulge your taste for drama and make your world's sun a swollen ball of soon-to-be-supernova if you like. It's all good.

If you can make it believable. Which means, at least in part, if you've done your research.

Research is at the heart of verisimilitude. It is impossible to provide telling details for your readers if you have no idea what those telling details should be. Some of this detail you will be able to generate on your own, either because you're writing out of your own storehouse of previously-acquired knowledge (otherwise known as "write what you know") or because you've constructed the person, place, or thing wholesale so that it answers to no known principles outside its own strictly defined borders. Everything else must be acquired somehow, and this is where the research comes in.

Mining for Possibilities

For a fiction writer, research is perhaps better understood as the task of mining for possibilities. Since it is not the purpose of fiction to dump information for information's sake into the reader's lap, you are happily reprieved from the thankless tasks of attempting to be either comprehensive or complete in the information you give. You have only to fill in the chinks of your story in a way that keeps the wind of disbelief from whistling through the cracks.

This, incidentally, provides the answer to the question "but how much research will I have to do?" The answer is always that you have to do sufficient research to make your story feel seamless from the reader's perspective. Writing good bullshit means writing things that contain just enough solid information that your reader would never suspect that you couldn't write a whole lot more. As a corollary, writing good bullshit means that your reach shouldn't extend your grasp of your subject matter, lest you prove to your reader that you've run out of authority. This generally translates to doing enough research so that you keep one step ahead of your readers: if you know slightly more than the reader will need to know to make sense of the story, you will very likely be fine.

Once you have sketched out or thought through the basics of your story, you should have a fairly good idea where it's going and what territory it is likely to traverse on its way there. This means that-whether you know it or not-you already have a good idea of what gaps your knowledge is going to have to fill. The more specifically you are able to define the parameters of your story, the more specifically you can define the parameters of your research.

When you head out to do your research, therefore, it behooves you to be prepared. Think through the story you're trying to write. Where is it set? Whom does it involve? What sorts of places, things, and technologies are important? Are there particular plot points-a gunfight in zero gravity? a virulent epidemic disease? a terrifying initiation ritual?-that you know are in the offing? How much do you already know about all these things? Begin by making some lists of broad questions and categories: "physics of projectile weapons," "methods of disease transmission," "psychology of rite of passage" and the like. Under these broad headings, you might write down some more specific lines of questioning: "kickback in zero-G: worse or better?" or "airborne viruses - what radius from infected person is dangerous?"

Doing this will help you think through the kinds of questions to which you and your readers might reasonably require answers to make the story work. Additionally, having some idea where you are going in your research will cut down on the time you spend acquiring information you don't need and won't use, and will also help you spot dead ends before you've spent too much time following them.

Choosing Research Sources

In research as in criticism, the dictum "consider the source" is well taken. In both cases, the more reputable the source, the more valid the information is likely to be. When it comes to research, the thing to look for in terms of securing quality information is peer review. Information that is reviewed by committees of scholars, editors, and other specialists is less likely to contain egregious errors for the simple reason that there have been more pairs of educated eyes looking it over for mistakes. This is why, generally speaking, multi-author reference works like dictionaries and encyclopedias, as well as academic-press resources, are among the most reliable sources available: the way that they are produced incorporates peer review.

Some, but definitely not all, online sources also incorporate peer review. Wikipedia, although a user-written resource, is also a user-reviewed and user-edited resource with literally thousands of participants providing not only original material but also peer review and revision. Over time, and thanks to the well-known tendency of geeks to out-geek one another, much of Wikipedia has become not only rigorous in its accuracy but very quick to respond to problems with the correctness of its data.

But even Wikipedia and other peer-reviewed sources can sometimes fail us. And this is why the best method for any researcher on any topic is to perform your own form of peer review: information comparison. Using only one source on any topic makes you vulnerable to whatever inaccuracies the author(s) of that source may have introduced. Using more than one source allows you to see whether sources disagree and where, to point out discrepancies in opinion, and to form an educated opinion of your own.

Looking for documentation is another good way to evaluate the worth of a source. Good sources typically tell you how they acquired the information they contain. They may describe experiments or events, they may include conversations or interviews, and they may give titles and authors for other written sources. Documentation is not an infallible indicator of quality, but sources that are documented are more likely to be accurate (or at least defensible) than sources that are not.

This is particularly important for online resources, which are often and notoriously devoid of anything approaching accuracy: if a source indicates no specific references, it is likely that it hasn't got any, and if you don't have the background to know whether it's accurate, you're treading dangerous turf. Additionally, if you find a number of online sources that repeat one another verbatim, yet have no other documentation, close the browser and run, do not walk, to your nearest library reference section. Verbatim repetition across websites generally means that none of the people who've reposted the text have the faintest clue about the subject, but have decided to steal the stuff someone else posted because it sounded good.

Also in the danger, Will Robinson category are other people's fictional works. Yes, many fiction writers do an excellent job of research and can be trusted to provide accurate and relevant detail in their work. But not all of them can, and if there's anything more embarrassing than getting caught stealing from another writer, it's getting caught stealing errors.

More to the point, relying on someone else's fiction may mean that you end up relying on someone else's fictions. If the author has done his or her job well-that is, if he or she has crafted exactly the kind of high-quality bullshit to which you yourself aspire-you may or may not be able to tell the difference between the things that are accurate in a general sense and the things that are really only accurate within the context of the story, world, or universe.

Hitting the Books

Almost all research begins in the reference section. Often you don't need to go far beyond it. Dictionaries and encyclopedias should be your first resources, but not just general-purpose ones: look for subject-specific encyclopedias and dictionaries. The Complete Encyclopedia of Arms and Weapons might've saved any number of would-be swords-and-sorcery authors from describing physical impossibilities with weapons whose size and heft they clearly did not understand. The Gale Encyclopedia of Science can provide useful introductions to topics from gravity to string theory. And when you realize that the Encyclopedia of Early Christianity could've entirely prevented the monstrous historiographical trainwreck known as The DaVinci Code if only it had been consulted in time, you begin to see just how crucial this kind of basic research can be.

Annotated bibliographies and subject bibliographies are a good next step. You can find these collections for many disciplines in the sciences and humanities. Typically they are lists of sources arranged by topic or sub-discipline; sometimes they are annotated with brief descriptions of the works and what you can expect to find in them. Although this practice is fading with the ubiquity of online catalogs, older bibliographies in some libraries will include marginalia written by library staff indicating which items are owned by the library in question, often providing a call number.

You may also find that there are standard references for the discipline you are researching that are not encyclopedias or dictionaries, but which are nonetheless considered basic to research in that area. They will sometimes be shelved in the reference section, but are not always. These include atlases, statistical manuals, diagnostic handbooks, and, frequently, introductory textbooks intended for college classroom use.

Particularly if you are very new to a topic, an introductory textbook can be a godsend. They are designed to do precisely what you need them to do: impart a good grounding on a particular subject in an organized and comprehensive fashion, without expecting too much in the way of prerequisites. As a bonus, textbooks often contain valuable added features like glossaries, bibliographies, timelines, maps, diagrams, and so forth, - a sort of one-stop-shopping center for your basic information needs.

Digging Deeper

Most of the sources listed above are what are called "tertiary sources," which means that they corral the information given in other documents, which in turn talk about the subject at hand using information gathered from other sources. (This research business can get recursive fast.) Tertiary sources tend to be general rather than specific, oriented toward the big picture, but based on a collection of more specialized and in-depth sources that get a little closer to a specific object or topic. It is to those secondary sources that you will want to turn when you need more specialized data. Secondary sources come in a variety of types.: monographs, biographies, histories of specific places/events, articles in journals or essays in collections, case studies, and reviews.

The best way to find applicable secondary sources is to strip-mine your tertiary sources. This is part of why documentation is so important. Without documentation, not only can you not verify the information in a particular piece of writing, but you can't easily go look up more details when you need them. Look for citations as you go through the tertiary sources, and make note of the citations that seem to pertain to the subject areas which most interest you. Pay special attention to footnotes, which often contain bibliographic information and information about the source(s) in question, and of course to the bibliography.

Additionally, pay attention to the names of subject authorities included in tertiary sources. These individuals are often also authors in their own right, and a quick library catalog search on their names should give you a list of their specialized works.

Crap vs. Bullshit (dance mix)

Every researcher must learn to develop a sense for what information they want to take away and what information to leave behind. Too many people feel that they must write down absolutely every bit of information that is new to them, no matter how infinitesimal its potential usefulness. These people rapidly become bogged down in details as well as racked with writers' cramp. The inability to proactively sort and organize research data is one of the reasons many people avoid it. You need share neither their fate nor their ignorance.

Particularly when one is trying to nurture the squirming vital larva of a story, it is painful to watch it suffocate beneath a dense heap of data. This brings us back to the difference between crap and bullshit: crap just stinks, while bullshit fertilizes and nourishes. Think of yourself as a gardener, first acquiring and then gently arranging a layer of manure of the appropriate thickness around the roots of your little seedling so that it can grow big and strong.

A caveat: you do need at least some systemic or comprehensive understanding of the subjects with which you plan to work. Plucking juicy factoids from the fruited vines of the reference section, daubing them with library paste, and sticking them into your story willy-nilly will not work.

Research exists in service of making the internal workings of a story self-reinforcing, and self-reinforcement implies the existence of some sort of system in which there are consistent tendencies, rules, and boundaries. If, for instance, you are going to write a story in which there is a race of humanoids who have birdlike wings and the power of flight, it behooves you to understand that birds, generally speaking, are not capable of helicopter-like vertical takeoff and landing. Bird-type wings don't work that way. And no amount of pasted-on "telling detail" about the Bernoulli effect will make them do so. Slotting those wingtip vanes, feeling the moist air turn almost solid for a moment between the rigid shafts of widespread feathers as you climb the air like a staircase will be a lot more powerful, and provide a far greater sensation of verisimilitude, when it fits in nicely with the real biomechanics of flight.

Assuming, however, that you have at least an elementary grounding in the subject at hand-those 101-level textbooks are your friends-not only may you zero in ruthlessly on the specifics you need, but you should. Accumulating enormous heaps of information that are extraneous to the story doesn't help you, and in the long run it rarely helps your reader either. For some reason, having information often seems to burn a hole in authors' intellectual pockets and they will turn around and inflict it all upon the poor hapless reader in some stale-smelling, suffocating infodump.

Making the Sale

In the end, doing the research is only part of the problem. Not having the right information can sink you, but not knowing what to do with it once you've got it will sink you faster. You have to learn how much data is too much and puts you into danger of committing infodumpery, and how much is too little. You have to be alert for misalignments, inexplicable events, and bad calculations that give the reader a reason to stop and start yanking on the loose bit of yarn to see why it isn't attached. This is something that can't really be taught, but there are some principles that may help you to think constructively about how to turn your hard-won research into solid verisimilitude.

Less is more: A modest gesture or detail that implies a comprehensive understanding is more effective than painstakingly demonstrating just how comprehensive your understanding is.

Don't overpromise, don't overshare: Don't leave openings for questions you can't answer; don't include answers for questions your story doesn't ask. Both poke holes in a fabric you're trying to keep seamless.

Keep your cards close to your chest: The reader should always know a little bit less than you do. If the reader genuinely needs more information in order to make sense of your story than you are able to provide gracefully in context, your problem may not be one of research so much as backstory.

Remember your purpose: This is fiction, not a documentary. Your job is to tell a story, not to teach a seminar. The research you do is there to lend support to your story, not as a replacement for it.

Sexy is nice, but seamless is better: The temptation can be strong to spangle your writing with particularly sexy and glamorous bits of information you come across in your research, but if they do not serve the general purpose of supporting the story and moving it along, they only divert the reader away from the narrative. If you're lucky, you might get bits of information that work out to be sexy and seamless at the same time, but if you must choose (and frequently you must), seamless wins every time.

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©Hanne Blank

Hanne Blank is the author/editor of five books, with a sixth, Virgin: The Untouched History, on the way in 2006 from Bloomsbury USA. Formerly an editor at Sojourner and a longtime editor for pioneering online sexuality magazine scarletletters.com, she learned early on that it just doesn't pay for editors to sugar-coat their advice to writers. Find her online at www.hanneblank.com.