InsaneJournal

Tweak says, "Don't eat yellow snow."

vjanssen (vjanssen) wrote,
@ 2008-01-18 10:30:00

Entry tags:

writing, wwiww

a little internet research
I'm following a friend's advice of long ago, which was "don't research it to death." For this reason, I'm keeping track of questions that come up while I'm writing, or while I'm thinking about a scene.

For the idea I had Wednesday night, I needed a reason why my English nurse character would be in Germany or Austria-Hungary when the borders closed and trains became unavailable. She's a nurse; could she have been taking a course of some kind, or visiting someone who worked in medicine?

A few minutes on the internet reminded me that pre-WWI Germany was a major player in the pharmaceutical industry. I want to know more, but don't need more for this scene, as it's just a pretext to put the nurse in a certain place at a certain time. So I avoided further research; I don't even need the name of a plausible place where she could be visiting; I can take details from many appropriate sources (in my head, from previous research reading) and combine them to make a fictional town that feels real for the time period. The anchor will be the fact that Germany plus pharmaceuticals is true.

	oursin 2008-01-18 04:30 pm UTC (link)
	So with you on the 'over-research' thing - or at least, writers who dump far too much of it into the finished work. On nurse, might she have been accompanying private patient to one of the many spas on the Continent? Or studying new approaches to consumption at sanatoria? (Reply to this) (Thread)

	vjanssen 2008-01-22 07:35 pm UTC (link)
	I know some writers can't start writing unless they know certain things, so they have to research more than they will use in the finished product. Skipping some research, I've found, can of course bite you in the rear when you find you've done something wrong, so they do have something there. But yes, too much, dumped too obviously, drives me nuts. (Reply to this) (Parent)