o At the same time, you don’t want to be boring. Even Mantel has
warned aspiring historical novelists not to inundate the reader
with everything you’ve learned. “Don’t show off,” she says.
“Your reader only needs to know about one tenth of what you
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suppleness, but doesn’t need to be demonstrated on every page.”z Knowing when to back off from the research is also important to the
process of writing itself. A work may be backed by extensive research, but
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useless detail at the expense of the story, it will be monumentally dull.
z If you’re writing a research-intensive narrative, the research and the
writing should be inseparable. In practice, this means that you need to
do the writing and the research at the same time, and this, in turn, means
that to begin with, you will be writing scenes without having much of an
idea of what you’re talking about.
Case Study: Using Research Productively
z Let’s consider a scene from an incomplete and unpublished
historical novel about an 18th-century Dutch explorer named Jacob
Roggeveen, who was the European discoverer of Easter Island.
In this scene, Jacob travels from his home in the small Dutch city
of Middelburg to the much larger and more cosmopolitan city
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z Early research revealed that Jacob was a notary, which was a kind
of lawyer; that he had never married or had children; and that he
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draft of the scene was written without much research into what
Amsterdam was like at the time of Jacob’s visit. After the rough
version of the scene was written, the additional facts that needed
to be researched became clear: What would Jacob have seen and
heard in the streets of Amsterdam in the year 1719, and how would
his fringe religious beliefs have affected his reaction to the vibrant
street life of a large city?