Research for fiction

So, picking up on the thoughts of A L Kennedy referred to in my last post, and the question of 'writing what you know' and research:

As Kennedy implies, these two things are not necessarily opposed: you need to research in such a way that your research becomes not just a body of facts 'out there', but deep, almost somatic  knowledge that is now part of you and will emerge in a honest and convincing way in your fiction.

Very rarely when I write a story do I start out with research as a priority. Perhaps one exception is 'The Next Stop Will be Didsbury Village', published this Spring in Confingo, but first commissioned for the 2017 performance Re/plac(ed), in which initial research was a stated prompt, and we commissioned writers sat around a table choosing sites in Didsbury to research and then write stories about. Even so, I knew already that I wanted to write about Didsbury railway/tram station because it had already been vivid for many years in my mental landscape, a resonant feature of my own life and past, and its history and changing character chimed strongly with my abiding themes of fluidity and memory and exile. Looking at old photos and maps and reading some of the history of Didsbury - and hanging around on the site and letting my imagination run in the light of them - served to make more vivid and concrete the sense I already had of it all, and locked my psyche into it more strongly.

Very often, however, you begin with something entirely personal and you still end up needing to do research. Last year two of my close relatives were involved in the Borough Market terrorist attack - neither of them physically hurt, thank goodness, though needless to say they were traumatised - and so there was no way I was not going to write about a terrorist attack at some time. Yet I hesitated: important as the subject was to me and my family, I felt that such a story needed to encompass a greater breadth than one family's particular perspective. I wanted to show wider circles of repercussion through society, and to touch on some of the causes. Finally, earlier this year, I wrote it, 'Kiss' (which was longlisted in this year's Short Fiction Prize, though is yet to be published). This was one story therefore where I dared to enter the heads of BAME characters - a young black man and the young Asian terrorist. I had in fact at one time done some research (for a proposal for a radio drama that never in fact saw the light of day) into the causes of radicalisation among Asian youth in the UK, but on the whole I had to rely on my own powers of empathy and understanding, and I hope they were up to it. However, the whole story revolves around the idea of touch/contact/kiss/detonation, and although when I started I thought I knew how bombs work, I soon found that I needed to check this out, and spent several days on bomb-making websites (and risking leaving a digital trail that could implicate me as a terrorist myself!)

In my first blog post back recently, I said that I had done little writing this summer, but I did write one story, and in fact I spent several weeks on research for it - more, perhaps, than I have ever spent for a short story. As I say in my last post, the idea of fixed identity has always been anathema to me - indeed feels threatening - so I've been very taken up by the recent debate concerning gender and gender transition. Transgender having only in recent years come to wide public debate, initially I felt pretty ignorant, and I read a lot, mainly personal testimonies. At this point I couldn't imagine writing a story about it (although Virginia Woolf's Orlando was always at the back of my mind): in the current social climate, I just felt it wasn't my place. But then my reading led me on to the subject of intersex (the condition of not being entirely female or entirely male, a condition which some scientists calculate exists in some form, often very subtle, in one in a hundred people), and this struck a real spark for me, and the urge to write about it arose. From there I was led off to the subject of embryology, and was off down a rabbit hole - utterly fascinated and absorbed, and it was all beginning to resonate for me in a way that felt entirely personal, relevant to me. It took a long time for me to be able to actually write a story - to absorb the research and make it mine, and then to find a form that didn't amount to cultural appropriation, and I had several failed attempts. I'm still not sure it's finished: I have put it aside to 'gel' before returning to it again. But the 'research' no longer feels like research: it feels part of my psyche and my life.