As I pointed out in my brilliantly-titled series over on North Texas Writers, one of the core skills that any writer must have is the ability to research and learn new things. A lot of this goes back to the core idea that “good science fiction is predicated by good science,” and you can generalize that to “good fiction in any genre is predicated by good research.” And that means that sometimes writers have to research things that could be considered… interesting to the sorts of people who use spiders, scrapers, and keyword alerts to determine who goes on a watch list.
I’m working on a new collection that I’m pretty excited about called Paper Cuts: A Mid-Apocalyptic Tale. It’ll be a tandem story, much like the movie Slacker from 1990 by Richard Linklater, examining figures through apparently isolated events but then following a different figure into a different part of the story. I have a lot of fairly lofty goals for this collection that require a lot of research.
In order to construct this meandering tale, though, I have to dig into a lot of stuff, some of which is nuanced and complicated, because every person in a story is a unique character with their own background and opinions, not all of which would necessarily reflect my own.
Hence, the sudden and intense uptick in my search history of anarchistic philosophy, the history of stateless communities, and where all the best drugs come from (as in, where medications are manufactured and also where domestic illicit substances originate).
I promise, I’m not planning anything nefarious or untoward. I just have this thing for writing as realistically as possible.
For instance, those who read some of the early versions of Middle of Nowhere (currently undergoing structural re-writes) could probably have used just my text to navigate their way to a couple of real-life research hospitals in Chicago and also to the local library in Joliet, circa 2009 or so – and some friends that lived in that area commented as much. No, I do not have a photographic memory from the one time I was visiting up there, I have access to Google Earth. (In the final version, you’d still be able to use that chapter as a map for a 2009 region because The Event occurred in a fixed point in time, but more importantly, I’m not cutting it during the rewrites.)
In Paper Cuts, I’ve thus far read several books on cliodynamics and anarchistic communes, gone through multiple sites about guns styles specialized for left-handed people, and more than the average number of pharmaceutical and drug sites. I’ve mapped existing neighborhoods in multiple cities, researched ancient Incan agriculture methods, and am opening up a whole new collection in my Zotero to collect articles on epidemiology. Writing about the end of the world without relying on singular catastrophic events is a lot, but I think it will ultimately be worth it.
Something else about Paper Cuts that I’m excited to explore is the various lived experiences of people with different modes of mental health. One character is schizophrenic, and her part of the story relies on her perspective, including how she chooses to interact with her hallucinatory figures, knowing that they’re hallucinatory. I’m very grateful that there’s a lot more literature and support for this specific condition that doesn’t focus exclusively on medications.
I’m looking at the impact of the degradation of social structure and safety nets on the existing homeless population. I want to see how people who have developed huge swaths of skills that apply in no way to surviving without a grocery store will fare with a massively degraded supply chain. We cannot possibly know how much of the world we take for granted right now can disappear, but I am imagining how we as a species and maybe as a civilization adapt to that when it happens incrementally instead of all at once. How would non-normative people – folks with disabilities, different relationship styles, mental health issues, abusive/toxic community expectations – respond and react to the structures of western capitalism crumbling, bit by bit?
A bit of a spoiler, there will be some big cataclysms for the world to deal with, but the main focus is that even big cataclysms tend to affect the individual in far less profound ways, at least at first. I think many of us envision catastrophic events through the lens of what we think someone dealing with it directly might experience, but I am constantly drawn back to the idea of a far-flung distant Roman outpost that is unaware of the loss of their centralized government until decades after it happened. What did those soldiers do when their supplies ran out? How did they adapt to their circumstances, to the climate, to the surrounding population? History has lots of stories about it, but what can we learn about that in our current climate should the (allegedly) unthinkable happen?
Like I said, I’m excited. I’m not sure what the final story count will be, but it’ll definitely be enough to dig into some seriously meaty topics.
All well-researched.