Endless research can be an occupational hazard. Johns taught a summer historical fiction workshop where only one writer out of ten brought pages for critique—the other nine had spent years absorbed in research. One woman had spent a decade. “I feel like I have to know everything before I can start,” Johns recalls her saying.
On the flip side are writers who consider their imagination a superpower that allows them to take on any identity they please—call it the Lionel Shriver perspective. (“I am hopeful the concept of ‘cultural appropriation’ is a passing fad,” Shriver said in 2016.)
“Writers sometimes feel too confident in their ability to imagine what it’s like to be someone else,” Vara tells me. “If you’re going to try to write outside of your experience, there’s an obligation to do research of some kind, because people read fiction with somewhat of an expectation that they’re learning something about the world we actually exist in. So if you’re writing a novel set in—I don’t know—Nova Scotia, and you’ve never been to Nova Scotia, that’s fine, but it feels to me like you need to do some work to figure out what life in Nova Scotia is like.”
Once you figure it out, you can invent. From truth emerges the fictional dream. {read}