The hierarchy of writing-research starts with personal experience.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 If you have ever cooked a meal,\u00a0 mucked out a stall,\u00a0 driven a car, or fallen out of a tree, you have a wealth of sensory inputs as well as intellectual understanding of those experiences available to use in a story.\u00a0\u00a0 You know, in the most direct way, what it’s like.<\/p>\n
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So every personal experience offers the writer material that no other source can match.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Many of those experiences can be generalized…if\u00a0 you’ve ever had a concussion (from any cause)\u00a0 you can use the feel–both physical and the mental and emotional effects–for a character’s concussion from other causes.<\/p>\n
However, every writer eventually wants to write about something that he or she has not experienced personally–including things for which there’s no next-best-thing reference available (that is, talking to someone who’s done it.)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Nobody yet has ridden on an interstellar spaceship.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 And nobody I know has been sailing on a ship like the one that fits the cultures of Paksworld.<\/p>\n
I have of course watched videos of replicas of period sailing ships of various kinds, and have looked at research on the kind I think would work in that world–talking to a naval historian, looking at plans, etc.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 But although I’ve been on small modern sailboats (not wooden)\u00a0 I have never sailed on a larger-than-small sail-powered vessel.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I’ve been in some squalls (not bad ones) on powered, steel vessels (ferries, most notably across the Cook Strait between North Island and South Island in New Zealand, but also from the mainland to Skye in Scotland, and across the mouth of Cheseapeake bay, from Norfolk to the DelMarVa peninsula in the US.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The big ferries, I know, do not behave anything like a caraval would.<\/p>\n
So I’m forced to rely on multiple accounts by those who have, in the past, been passengers in various kinds of wooden sailing vessels, combining that with my very minimal personal experience.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The few times in my life I’ve had motion sickness all involved airplanes in turbulence,\u00a0 when I was already tired.\u00a0 (I’ve been on equally rough flights without a problem, when rested.)\u00a0\u00a0 But the descriptions of rough passages, of sea-sickness,\u00a0 suggest that my experiences in an airplane are quite similar in sensory feel to those of a small ship in rough seas.\u00a0 Unpredictable motion in all three dimensions–pitch, yaw, and roll.<\/p>\n
Is this a hint that someone’s going on a sea voyage?\u00a0\u00a0 Maybe.\u00a0\u00a0 If someone does, it would be unrealistic to give them a perfectly smooth voyage.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Sea voyages, whether fictional or real, are known for including some unpleasant moments.\u00a0\u00a0 Or so my research indicates.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The hierarchy of writing-research starts with personal experience.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 If you have ever cooked a meal,\u00a0 mucked out a stall,\u00a0 driven a car, or fallen out of a tree, you have a wealth of sensory inputs as well as intellectual understanding of those experiences available to use in a story.\u00a0\u00a0 You know, in the most direct […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[61,100],"tags":[62,12],"class_list":["post-1846","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-craft","category-crown-of-renewal","tag-craft-of-writing","tag-research"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1846"}],"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=1846"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1846\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1847,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1846\/revisions\/1847"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1846"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1846"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1846"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}