Our Research Notes series invites authors to describe their process for a recent book, with “research” defined as broadly as they like. This week, James Terry writes about The Return from Outpost 19.
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I wouldn’t take it as a compliment if someone were to say of one of my fictions that it was well-researched. That’s like telling a magician that their manual dexterity is outstanding. If the research stands out, the illusion has been broken.
To my mind, the soul of a story is born of the imagination, the subconscious, the emotional undercurrents of memory, which have little to do with accurate information. Too much research can derail the imagination. For that reason, I try to put off research for as long as possible, even when I know that the story I’m working on is missing important details that need to be accurate. I’m not a writer who can plot out a novel in advance, do all the research, then sit down and work from an outline. I’m a blind groper, feeling my way forward by intuition. By putting off my research, I limit it to only what the story needs. When I do hit a pocket that I know is going to benefit from a precise word or a context that I’m not in full command of, I usually fill the space with nonsense words and carry on. I’ve found that maintaining the rhythm of the sentences is more important than the facts they will eventually contain.
For my novella The Return, there were a number of areas that I had little first-hand knowledge about that needed to be rendered accurately if the story was to succeed. My protagonist is an older French professor of avant-garde silent cinema. I’m not French (nor do I speak the language), I have never been a professor, and I know very little about avant-garde silent cinema. But the story demanded these things.
There was quite a lot of gibberish in the early drafts, which would eventually need to be replaced with precise, relevant details. My professor is obsessed with a lost French silent film from 1923. The content of this fictitious film, its story and its realization on celluloid, needed to be described convincingly. For this I drew from Richard Abel’s books: French Cinema: The First Wave, 1915-1929; The Sounds of Early Cinema; French Film Theory and Criticism, Vol.1:1907-1929, which also filled me in on the Parisian cinemas, cine clubs, and film journals of the day. As always, there were also good online resources.
My favorite use of research is as a springboard for imagination. When I do feel that a lack of knowledge is preventing me from progressing in the story, I will read in that area, and sometimes something unexpected will fire my imagination and open the closed door. The back story for the fictitious director of the lost film is indebted to the life and work of Dimitri Kirsanoff, an Estonian who had emigrated to Paris after the Russian Revolution and made a number of avant-garde films with Nadia Sibirskaia, his lover and collaborator. Some of their films are available on YouTube. The story of their lives, which I happened upon by chance, opened up depths of feeling in me, which I gave to my professor, to the benefit of the book.
My story demanded that this lost avant-garde film have an anti-capitalist subtext, so I searched for and found detailed descriptions of early silent films that critiqued capitalism and took what I needed from them. My professor’s politics were forged in the crucible of May ’68, which I knew the gist of, but for a short flashback of him participating in the student protests, I read a few books to get my details straight. In doing so, in a book on the graffiti of May ’68, I stumbled upon the perfect epigraph for my book: La liberté, c’est le droit au silence. Freedom is the right to silence.
I’m not immune to the pleasures of research. It’s a good way to spend a day instead of doing the hard work of trawling one’s subconscious. But it never fails that the passage or page of prose born of meticulous research is the one I end up cutting because it either does nothing for the story or is trying to explain something that doesn’t need an explanation. For one of my professor’s lectures, I researched American silent films with anarchist and anti-capitalist themes. I wrote the lecture, had him deliver it, then, after polishing it to perfection, cut the whole thing when I realized it contributed nothing to the story.
The Return is set in an actual place – Berkeley, California – where I went to college and lived in the environs of for a decade afterwards. Memory gave me the important stuff – it’s been twenty years since I was last in the Bay Area – but Google maps helped when I needed to get the name of certain streets right. I also enjoyed taking virtual strolls on Google Street View, as I assume all writers do nowadays when they want to get the details right of an urban landscape they don’t inhabit.
When I was at Berkeley, a street performer named Stoney Burke was a mainstay on the campus. He would stand out in front of Dwinelle Hall in a clown get-up and deliver entertaining harangues about capitalism and Republicans and whatever outrageous headlines happened to grace that day’s Daily Cal. I wanted him in my book. I had vivid memories of his appearance, his voice, his rhythms, but I couldn’t remember a single word he’d ever spoken. Luckily, there were a few vintage videos of him on YouTube that I could pull some speech from, get a feel for his cadences, then have him deliver a routine relevant to my themes.
My favorite bit of research was coming up with a list of French terms for various sexual positions. In the story, the professor is transcribing a bunch of old microcassettes he recorded in the 1970s of interviews with people who had been present at the one and only screening of the lost film. The most notorious part of the film was a pornographic sex scene. Each of the interviewees remembers the scene differently: “le 69,” “le chien,” “contre le mur,” “le sphinx,” “la cuillère,” “le cheval à bascule,” “la victoire,” etc.
That was fun.
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James Terry is the author of a short story collection, Kingdom of the Sun (University of New Mexico Press, 2016), and two novels, The Solitary Woman of Shakespeare (Sandstone, 2016), which was shortlisted for the 2017 HWA Debut Crown Award, and Heir Apparent (Skyhorse, 2019). His short stories have been nominated multiple times for the Pushcart and O.Henry prizes.