Research: How Far to Go By Caroline Carver
I’m delighted to be kicking off the book tour for Caroline Carver’s new book ‘Spare Me The Truth’ and today on the first day, Caroline talks about how far to go when it comes to researching for a book.
For an author to create a richly textured novel, it gives them a tremendous edge if they’ve lived or worked within the environment they’re writing about. Like John Grisham who builds his stories around lawyers, and Michael Connelly, a crime reporter for the Los Angeles Times.
The trouble for me with ‘Spare Me the Truth’, and its three main characters, was that I’m not an MI5 officer, or a police constable, or even a GP, so I had to create each individual’s worlds purely from research.
To start with, I turned to the Internet, which is a fantastic tool and today I can’t think how I managed to survive without it. The trouble is, an article on a murder will lead me off on a merry chase of forensic science, how the pattern of cuts in a pyjama top sent a killer to jail, how to tell a murder from what appears to be a cut-and-dried case of suicide (this one kept me occupied for ages). I have to be very strict in getting the information I need and not what I find fascinating or I can merrily fritter away hours.
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[/amazon_link]Since my novel is mostly set in the UK, it was easy to get up to Stockton-on-Tees, then Basingstoke and London. For the snapshot scenes set in India I’ve drawn on my time there which, although years ago, are still vibrant in my memories. I’m careful of the time I spend walking the streets of my novel or I could keep walking, captivated, for days. Just enough to soak up its atmosphere and see with my own eyes locations that would figure in my story, and whether a street smells of fish and chips or freshly ground coffee.
I interviewed a spook, a cop and a GP. I was extremely particular in how I approached these professionals, not wanting to waste their time, and wrote an extensive outline before talking to them. This narrowed my questions down nicely, and made me look far less woolly than if I’d met them during the ideas stage. It also prevented me from making some potentially embarrassing errors as well as providing new avenues of ideas. I had one (fairly lengthy) meeting with each, and although I would have loved more, it was perfectly enough for my purposes. I did, however, keep in touch by email for the smaller queries that cropped up while writing the book.
Writing is all about authenticity. With ‘Spare Me The Truth’, for example, I made a conscious effort to garner enough information on the real-life memory-erasing drug without getting bogged down into massive technical detail. It’s my bet readers will have little patience with long descriptive passages of propranolol uses!
Over time, I’ve learned to trust how much research I need to do, and it’s a lot less than when I first started writing. Now, I simply know a little … about a lot.
You can pre-order [amazon_link id=”1785760335″ target=”_blank” ]Spare Me the Truth: An Explosive, High Octane Thriller (The Dan Forrester Series) from Amazon [/amazon_link] and will be available to buy from good bookshops from 7th May 2016.
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