Research is part of any writing, fiction or nonfiction.\u00a0\u00a0 If you know you’re going to write about shoemakers in New England in colonial times\u00a0 (just to grab for a topic I know nothing about), you would have a limited topic and your research would need to be “deep”.\u00a0\u00a0 If you know you’re going to write a novel set in an invented world (SFnal or fantasy), then your research must be broad and had better be deep in some areas.<\/p>\n
But no matter whether your topic is narrow or wide, some of the research you do won’t make it into the book…at least, not into a book anyone will want to read.\u00a0 Most of us have read a book that “taught us more about penguins than we really wanted to know,”\u00a0 written by someone who did a lot of research and wanted someone else to share the pain.<\/p>\n
I love doing research, and I love finding ways to use my own experience (a primary research source) in the books.\u00a0\u00a0 The advantage of age plus a habit of learning new things means that I’ve got a good bit of “doing stuff” stored up in my head.\u00a0\u00a0 And the history degree and the biology degree added considerable formal ballast to the informal study that I now call “research.”\u00a0 But some experiences–though I learned a lot from them–just haven’t found a home in the books, yet.\u00a0\u00a0 The people in the Paksworld books are familiar with these things–and some readers aren’t–but the experiences haven’t proven themselves plot-worthy enough to be fully described, or amenable to the casual mention and brief description.<\/p>\n
I had another one of those yesterday, Saturday.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 That was “lamb processing” day, and processing, in this case, means going from a live critter to chunks of meat in the freezer and a roast\u00a0 in the oven that became dinner for us and our guests.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 This isn’t the first critter we’ve processed–the first were chickens–and certainly not the biggest (a very large bull…and we’re not doing THAT again!\u00a0 We need to be younger, stronger, and more of us.)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 A 131 pound “transitional” lamb (still tastes like lamb, but looks like a grown sheep, though it’s not)\u00a0 is a project that two older, not as strong as we were, people can handle.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I learn something new every time we do it.<\/p>\n
And you would think, in Paksworld, where people eat meat of various kinds, a slaughter & butchering scene would show up as plotwise somewhere<\/em>.\u00a0\u00a0 I know they do it.\u00a0\u00a0 I even know some of the cultural differences in how, where, when, under what circumstances they do it.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Is it that I don’t trust readers to understand that it’s part of the culture?\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 That showing someone walking past where it’s happening would squick too many readers?\u00a0 I don’t know.\u00a0\u00a0 I know I’ve written….and deleted…such scenes as not leading anywhere–not being plot-worthy.<\/p>\n I’ve seen such scenes in other peoples’ books (and some of them, naming no names, clearly got their information from books or videos, not from doing it themselves.)\u00a0\u00a0 Others did it very well, titrating the information to their audience\u00a0 (Arthur Ransome, in Picts and Martyrs<\/em>,\u00a0 one of the Swallows & Amazons groups of books,\u00a0 describing a fairly urban boy dealing with cleaning and skinning a dead rabbit he and his sister were supposed to cook.)<\/p>\n The thing about home meat processing is that it’s work.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Even with a chicken–even one chicken, let alone several–there’s some work involved, and when it’s a larger critter you can definitely feel you’ve earned that lamb chop or that beef steak.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The artists in the trade–the ones in some of the videos online–have done it enough, and do it often enough, that they’re as accurate as surgeons in cutting exactly where they should.\u00a0\u00a0 We are, at this stage, intermediate novices at best.\u00a0 We get it done, but slower and more awkwardly than the professionals.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Each time we do a little better, but one or two a year isn’t really building expertise.\u00a0 Except that now, when we look at a video, we know what they’re doing, why,\u00a0 and can use their expertise as instruction.<\/p>\n Over at Rancherfriend’s, we have a meat saw (it’s actually ours; we bought it, thinking we’d do most of the processing over there.)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Here, we don’t–and since our lamb source moved across the country from near Rancherfriend to near us, it’s easier to do it here than there.\u00a0 This means hand tools, not power tools (no, we’re not moving the extremely heavy, required-truck-with-hoist, meat saw over here.)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 And that makes it even more relevant experience in terms of Paksworld.<\/p>\n Because we started with less-than-perfect knives for the job,\u00a0 and gradually acquired, one by one,\u00a0 really good ones, I can easily imagine butchers in Paksworld’s cities\u00a0 lusting for dwarf and elf-made blades.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 A less-than-honest butcher might see a dwarf butcher dismembering a hog, say,\u00a0 and start wondering\u00a0 if what it would cost to hired a Guild thief to “find” one or more–would it be cheaper than trying to buy one off the dwarf? \u00a0 But what kind of vengeance would dwarves take, on anyone stealing their blades or being found with a dwarf-made blade he or she couldn’t prove had been bought legitimately?<\/p>\n Once the critter is carved up into pieces, and gets into the kitchen, it’s all cooking from then on.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Fresh lamb loin roast, which is what we had last night because we had company (they weren’t involved in the earlier activities) is amazing.<\/p>\n Another thing about the processing of our own meat is that the connection between the land, the animal, and the food on the table is very clear and present.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 We don’t raise the lambs ourselves (they come from a few miles away) but we know where they’re raised.\u00a0\u00a0 They aren’t anonymous lumps in clear plastic.\u00a0\u00a0 They were somebody’s lamb, that somebody raised, and I personally (certainly not true of everyone who does their own processing) feel they deserve a name, acknowledgment that each is an individual. \u00a0 If they don’t arrive with a name, I give them one. \u00a0 (This was Polly; last spring was Bucky.)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 It’s not sentimentality–after all I’m about to kill them–but a way of not ducking the fact that they are alive and–after all, I’m about to kill them.\u00a0\u00a0 It’s mindfulness: staying in the moment and aware of what I’m doing.<\/p>\n Something about killing and cutting up the meat may get into a future book.\u00a0 I never know what will come out of research when.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Research I feel is needed for a particular book has already opened a hole for itself (learning to scythe, for Surrender None<\/em>, for instance, and learning more about counterfeiting, for the new Paks books.)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 But general life experience, be it singing in a large choir or killing a lamb and turning the carcass into food, just happens as life goes on, and may or may not end up in a book.<\/p>\n Oh–sure as anything, someone will ask this if I don’t answer it: we kill the larger critters (cattle, lambs) with a bullet to the brain.\u00a0\u00a0 It’s quick and (for a killing shot) not messy.\u00a0\u00a0 Given a calm critter,\u00a0 one shot is all it takes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Research is part of any writing, fiction or nonfiction.\u00a0\u00a0 If you know you’re going to write about shoemakers in New England in colonial times\u00a0 (just to grab for a topic I know nothing about), you would have a limited topic and your research would need to be “deep”.\u00a0\u00a0 If you know you’re going to write […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[53,5],"tags":[112,12,107],"class_list":["post-1371","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life-beyond-writing","category-the-writing-life","tag-life-beyond-writing","tag-research","tag-the-writing-life"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1371"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1371"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1371\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1372,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1371\/revisions\/1372"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1371"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1371"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1371"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}