Research is vital if you want your story to succeed emotionally

Imagine that you're writing a story about a horse race. Your protagonist's horse is in second place, just barely behind their arch-nemesis. Right as they approach the finish line, the protagonist's horse gathers itself for a mighty leap and propels itself into the air over the other horse to claim victory.

This is a very dramatic and exciting moment - or it could be, if it weren't for the fact that it is completely impossible. Horse races don't involve leaping. This scene will fall completely flat for any reader who recognizes its impossibility. The readers most likely to know about how horse races work are people who care about horse races. These are also the readers who are most likely to be emotionally invested in a story about horse racing.

EDIT: For another example of a scene being cheapened by its lack of realism, I give you: NCIS: Two idiots, one keyboard

Poorly researched inaccuracies alienate the readers who are the most emotionally invested in your story.

That's not a good thing.

The more emotionally attached people are to an event, the more important it is to portray that event correctly.

The more recent an event is, the more attached people will be to it.
The more important an event is, the more attached people will be to it.

The Holocaust is both in living memory (if only barely), and HUGELY important. You don't want to screw it up, and you will if you don't research it.

Research will make your story better

Even if you weren't worried about alienating your readers you should research anyways, because the details you will learn will enhance your story.

Learning about the way people lived, how they acted, and how they survived will inspire countless details that will allow you to move your story in new and interesting ways. Truth is stranger than fiction in many dramatic and exciting ways, but you can't take advantage of that unless you have researched those details.

Finally,

You will never be perfect

While watching Spiderman: Homecoming, I was briefly thrown out of the story because I happen to know that there are only two different schools who have won the Academic Decathlon in the past 8 years, and neither of them is anywhere close to New York. Peter Parker's school winning AcaDeca had to be fictional because the school doesn't exist, and it still briefly threw me out of the story. No matter what you do, you will not be able to perfectly recreate the events you are describing. That's okay. But you still need to get close enough that readers familiar with the subject aren't constantly being distracted by your inaccuracies. A blip here or there is fine.

posted over 5 years ago

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Arcanist Lupus‭

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In contrast to other answers, I have to say that research is not necessarily required. This is entirely dependent on your intended readership.

If you're writing a bodice-ripper set in King Arthur's Court, well, research won't help you much and may well get in the way. Your audience probably doesn't know and doesn't care that life in them times was nasty, brutal, and short, and that chivalry was widely admired and just as widely ignored. Inconsequential details like universal fleas and lice will just get in the way of the story. The charming custom of bathing once a year probably won't help with modern readers, either - at least not the sort who read bodice-rippers.

In fact, what you need to do in this case is no research at all on what life was like back then, but rather concentrate on the knowing the preconceptions of your audience.

What you need to do above all else is to learn what the audience will and will not accept. Accuracy is entirely optional. Acceptable verisimilitude is not.

posted over 5 years ago

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WhatRoughBeast‭

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Some events are far-off historical events. The most you risk if you write about them without doing the proper research is making a fool of yourself.

Other events are still within living memory. Some of your readers might have lived the event. @SaraCosta says in the comment that not doing research is a sign that "the writer has very little respect for their chosen period / event". Well, there would be living people whom you'd be disrespecting.

One particular way in which you could show disrespect is believing yourself to be exaggerating an event, when in fact you're falling drastically short. I always have a nervous twitch watching Casablanca, when they talk of Laszlo having escaped the Concentration Camps. I think of a concentration camp, I see this (warning graphic):

(source)

Only, of course, when Casablanca was filmed, they didn't know yet. At least, the film-makers didn't.

The issue with believing yourself to be exaggerating an event, when in fact you're falling drastically short, the way you're being disrespectful, is you're underestimating the magnitude of the event. You're underestimating how big it was, how horrifying, how inescapable. You're telling people that their experience is not as big as they know it to have been. That can strike deep.

Also, if an event is still within living memory, it isn't too hard to do the research. You can find accounts and testimonies - written, or on youtube. Because research is easy, it follows that you didn't bother to do the research - you thought it "not worthy of your time", "not sufficiently important". That is how people would see it, and this too they would find offensive.

posted over 5 years ago

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Galastel‭

1885 reputation 81 551 319 3

Just don't.

You have a good ten thousand years of (semi) recorded history to choose from, in what is now hundreds of countries and multiple continents. There are many places and times you can pick that most people would know nothing about and you can get away with making stuff up.

Don't pick an event that has deep meaning for a very large number of people and is studied and commemorated by a good subset of them. If you're lucky, the worst that will happen is that people will think you're disrespectful.

Remember, a fair number of people out there believe the Holocaust never happened (or was a fraction of what it was in reality) and so they make up stories to downplay it. It doesn't matter if you think you're going to make it seem worse, the fact is that you'll be making up stories (and I don't mean ordinary fiction) and calling them history, and that's not okay.

Also, if you don't do the research, how do you know if your version is "worse?" Chances are, as other answers have pointed out, that you can't fathom the horrors of the actual Holocaust. I doubt anyone can without having lived it or learned about it from people who have.

As for other historical events, it depends. For events without a lot of attached emotion, if you get some things wrong, most people won't notice and some people will and will laugh at you. If you can live with that, then go for it.

Every author will mess up here and there and nearly every author will also make choices they know are wrong. I just posted a question where I am using a song written in a language that didn't even come into existence until a good 400 years after my setting.

But that's very different from deciding to be ignorant. Why would you want to use a large important event so recent that living people were actually there, as a...backdrop? tragic setting? life lesson? I can't even fathom what makes you think this is a good idea.

posted over 5 years ago

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Cyn‭

1130 reputation 25 439 215 0

If you don't want to research the history directly, you may want to look into the historiography -- how the history of something is studied/understood.

Often that is why we supermoderns laugh at older works, because they made assumptions we think are silly, but by working from the common narratives of the time, yep, the "Dark Ages" were generally a bad time, instead of a poorly-documented one (well, few were available about that time for ages.)

Or a well-publicized Winner's Edit view of history ("Manifest Destiny" was taught in my elementary school as the normal way of the world -- now I realize how colonialist it is/was). Often things such as oral histories were disregarded as not "real" because they weren't the expected "formal" style.

Listening to a few podcasts (especially Tides of History and "Our Fake History"), I've learned how historians now incorporate the findings of archeologists and other non-textual documentation to understand the world.

before I go deeper, a key point: I'm assuming we ARE dealing with Facts = Facts: no denying it happened, no minimizing 6 million Jews, and about 10 million other victims.

So for the Holocaust example - how is it taught in Germany, where (to my in-researched recollection) Nazi imagery is forbidden? How is it taught in countries in Africa, who have had their own genocides, but perhaps little contact with most European history? Was it understood differently?

I was profoundly influenced by the book Guns, Germs, and Steel , in which the fact that Europe/Asia is mostly an east-west spreading land-mass, while Africa and the Americas are mostly north-south spreading -- so the commonalities of terrain influenced how abilities and information were shared, creating feedback loops.... What sort of feedback loops influenced the every day European Citizen?

Many more Theories of History are available as lenses to use for research. You don't need to research for fiction the same way you do for a History Test, but using these various ways of thinking about research can help give you insights into how you view your world and the world you're focused on, and thus can inspire some characters/scenarios for your book.

These theories influence a lot of subgenres: time-travel to kill Hitler? Great Man Theory. Alt-history where the Third Reich expands only so far, and America ignores it? Perhaps it would implode in a societal collapse as it destroyed some of its greatest strengths. Writing about the daily life at start of the Reich -- how did they get from originating universities to this? History of Mentalities. Perhaps it's an outgrowth of the Information Revolution which started earlier than many think...

Yes, these links are all Wikipedia -- that's because they're great starting points before deciding how to go deeper. But great fiction isn't just plot and details, but thinking about how the characters think, and how the society thinks, and whether those are in synch or opposition. So research isn't just a chore, or something done to appease nitpickers, but ways of understanding conflict and character in very deep ways. (This is also why fiction-reading leads to great empathy -- a good writer can help you understand why someone would make decisions that might seem impossible.)

Good luck! This book sounds hard, but it could be great!

posted over 5 years ago

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April Salutes Monica C.‭

245 reputation 19 94 39 0

In general, avoid writing about things you don't know

You are right to have misgivings about writing on a topic you haven't researched. There are a lot of risks involved in doing this. You risk offending people by accident, you risk misrepresenting real people in your work and you risk being called a lazy writer for not doing your research.

Know your topic

With most topics it is nearly impossible to write about it well if you don't know what you are talking about. To write a good story set in London you need to know what London is like. Either you have lived there and know if from experience, or you do extensive research on the culture, layout, transport, architecture and climate. To not do this would open yourself up to poor reviews where readers correct all your mistakes. The same rules apply to historical settings.

Avoid giving details that may be wrong

If you feel that this is the only setting in which your story could work, then you should do the research. If you don't want to then avoid detailing the setting anymore than necessary. It is possible to write a story with a backdrop of a historical setting without giving details of it.

Many stories use the World Wars as a backdrop for the story. The Chronicles of Narnia is set during World War II but doesn't go into detail about the war itself. (Not that I'm suggesting C.S. Lewis didn't do his research) You can do a similar thing if you focus your story on a smaller scale, focus on the characters and the narrative rather than the setting.

Add a disclaimer

This work of fiction is for entertainment purposes only. Any misrepresentation of actual events is unintentional.

This won't stop people being offended, but may prevent the backlash.

I've given some advice on how to get away with writing without research, but my real message is: Do the research. Your writing will be better for it and you might learn a few things along the way that you would like to include.

posted over 5 years ago

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linksassin‭

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