Short Story Research

Hello Everyone,

Currently I'm in Xi'an, China, researching a short story. It's a story that I wrote four years ago but which never quite worked (likely because I wasn't good enough to accomplish the ambitious structure). Back then I read more than twenty books on the Cultural Revolution, and acheived a degree of versimilitude, but it wasn't quite enough.

So now I'm in the country. I hope the proximity to the smell of fish oil tofu and fried scorpions on sticks and having my internet access censored and the tiny police sheds on the corners of buildings with red and blue lights and the ridged corridors near steps for bikes and people burning trash and the elderly doing Tai Chi and the beds so hard they feel like boards with sheets over them will fertilize my imagination. I feel more fertile already.

Cormac McCarthy dismissed short stories, claiming that anything that doesn't take years of your life and drive you to the brink of suicide isn't worth doing, but as short story writers know, a lot of short stories take years and drive you to suicide.

So: What's the craziest research you've ever done for a short story? Sure, any length of research is acceptable for a novel, but I don't often hear about the extreme lengths people go for a single short story. Give me your wild extravagances.

Comments

[G]

Nothing too wild like yours, but I did spend quite a few days in the library re-reading Dante's "The Divine Comedy" in order to get a few character names correct and to make sure I had the correct number levels for Hell and Purgatory. And the Bible as well.

All for a longish (about 17K) short story about revenge.

[Clark Zlotchew]

I'm wondering why BookFox worked on a story about China if he had never been there. Getting info to make the story seem real seems like a very expensive way to work on one short story. I hope he went to China for other reasons as well (as a tourist, for example). China is a great place for a tourist; the culture is as different as you can get on Planet Earth from U.S. culture (and it's the differences that make a place interesting, for me), yet the people seem very open, friendly and have a good sense of humor. My wife and I were there for 3 weeks July 2005 and really enjoyed it. Now, spending days in the library with Hell and Purgatory, seems reasonable.

[Nicole Wolverton]

I've interviewed firefighters to determine the best way to start a particular fire. I'm pretty sure I'm on some sort of arson watchlist now. Heh!

[BookFox]

@Charles
Lots of writers write stories about places they've never been. It's just about using your imagination and doing the research. For instance, Ben Fountain's Brief Encounters with Che Guevara, where every stories was set in a different international locale. He had been to about half of the locations, and the other half he just researched.

And yes, don't worry I have other reasons for being here too. Four generations of my family were here, and I wanted to visit their/my homeland, and I'm also taking students on a photography tour.

@Nicole

You pyro. :) And I could write a whole other list on research done by writers that gets them into trouble. (Thai brothel research?)

[DeMisty]

Nothing too weird:

*I asked people what steaks taste like (I'm a vegetarian). The best description I got--and which I used!--was buttery. Who would have thought?

*I looked at pictures of a dead pig in different stages of decay, read up on, and talked to a coroner about a body left dead for a few days.

[BookFox]

@DeMisty

Dead cow, dead pig, dead human. Bit of a morbid preoccupation, wouldn't you say?

[yfkeo1]

Anthony Doerr researches tons, I think.

[Dobidox]

You should really look into the works of Howard Waldrop http://www.sff.net/people/waldrop/.
He spends an incredible amount of time on his short stories, which is what he's primarily known for, and they are chock full of deliciously obscure details which do not detract from the story in any way.

[seema]

nice...!