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Q&A Researching sensitive subjects

How do you research subjects for a novel that might be sensitive? Both cultural and jurisdictional. Example: I usually try to "research" the setting and characters for my texts from real life. Whe...

1 answer  ·  posted 12y ago by Vanni‭  ·  last activity 5y ago by System‭

#3: Attribution notice added by user avatar System‭ · 2019-12-08T02:39:29Z (about 5 years ago)
Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/q/6973
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
#2: Initial revision by user avatar Vanni‭ · 2019-12-08T02:39:29Z (about 5 years ago)
How do you research subjects for a novel that might be sensitive? Both cultural and jurisdictional.

Example: I usually try to "research" the setting and characters for my texts from real life. When I wrote a story about a priest I visited a lot of old churches and graveyards just to get a "feeling" for the place.

Now I'm planning to write a story where the main character is a 12-13 year old girl. Since it's a long time that I was in that age myself I wanted to get a feeling for what you look like at that age, some vocabulary and so on. Therefore I sat down with my friend Google and typed in a search string looking for girls around 12 years.

Just before hitting the enter button I was struck by what I was doing. Oh-no this looked so wrong in so many ways even though my intentions where honorable.

So how do you do it?

#1: Imported from external source by user avatar System‭ · 2013-01-03T09:36:26Z (almost 12 years ago)
Original score: 7