In the book you're writing, you've ahd to research a subject. You have pages about this subject and want to weave it into your story. So you begin and go on and on. Suddenly your fictional story becomes a class about the subject you've researched. I know so well how this can happen. In one of my books, I was researching India. Now there wasn't that much about India in the book since the heroine and her sisters leave India and travel to England. When the first draft finished, I astounded myself with the amount of detail I had about the India of the 1800s. The entire first chapter read more like a travelogue of the time and the land.
Then came the revision and the cutting. Which of the facts would advance the story. After much hair-pulling, I finally trimmed about eight thousand words from the book.
Research is necessary for the writer to learn about places, careers and other things but must be used judiciously in the story. Put some of the things in dialogue rather than long passages of prose. You might sneak in some of the information in the character's thoughts. Just don't give a lecture about what you're writing about.
1 comment:
It is so true that research is fun, and I am always sorry that I can't use everything I've learned.
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