Lecture 23: Approaches to Researching Fiction
o In contrast, Crace’s novel +DUYHVW is set in the same period of
English history as Mantel’s novels, but Crace never mentions
the year, nor does he include any reference to real historical
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intimate account of village life. His work has a contemporary
immediacy, but Crace evokes the feeling of a distant time and
place mainly by using bits of archaic vocabulary.A Middle Ground
z *HURQWLXV is a work by another British novelist, James Hamilton-
Paterson, loosely based on the life of the composer Sir Edward Elgar. In
the author’s note at the beginning of the book, Hamilton-Paterson talks
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changed some of the details of Elgar’s life, and at the end of the note, he
says, “For the rest, I tried to be as factually correct as was interesting.”z This improvisatory, ad hoc
attitude to using research seems
a sensible approach because it
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said, the primary purpose of
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vivid and continuous dream in
the mind of the reader, and the
two main requirements of any
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believable and interesting.
o For this reason, it’s
important to get the
facts right because
doing so will make
the narrative more
interesting and believable. At the very least, you don’t want to
distract the reader with obvious, easily preventable mistakes.
If your reader must stop to think about something that doesn’t
seem right, you’ve broken the surface tension of the dream.Even the most mainstream novel may
often require a few hours of research
so that the writer doesn’t distract the
reader with unnecessary errors of fact.© IPGGutenbergUKLtd/iStock/Thinkstock.