Hitting the books

How much research should you do when creating a fictional world, and how much should you leave to your imagination?

I think it depends on how confident you are with your themes. And I certainly have one, which I thankfully have no direct experience with - suicide. This isn't directly addressed in my book but it is an undercurrent. I approached it with as much assumption as I could muster, but knew that at some point I was going to have to inject some serious reading.

I also have a spiky sister relationship - I didn't feel quite as out of my depth with this one - but still had limited personal experience to draw on.

I looked to Amazon for everything I could dig up on sisters and suicide, and after reading the free samples, loaded up my kindle with those that caught my interest.

At this point, my husband told me that the very fact that I was researching indicated that I was more serious about this book than the others. It was desperately what I needed to hear - that others noted the gear shift which just might suggest that this is the one.

To date, I think I've only spent four or so hours reading those books. Mainly because the suicide theme is captured in diary entries which weave through the book. I decided to leave them out for a while - working on a full 2nd draft of the main story. After which, I will focus entirely on the diary, until, finally, I can seamlessly (wishful thinking) twist the two together.

Yet the little research I have done, has already inspired, such as (it may help to add that my character dies in water):

-There are often periods of furious activity pre-suicide.

-Diary entries of those that commit suicide often become less complex, shorter sentences and more self-orientated.

-Hamlet quote - '...When down her weedy trophies and herself
Fell in the weeping brook. Her clothes spread wide,
And mermaid-like they bore her up...'

The mermaid idea was something I loved instantly - a girl mesmerised by the sea, drawn to it, scared to walk in for fear that she wouldn't want to walk out. That she had romanticised the idea of death.

Dark stuff! But nonetheless a place I had to visit in order to come back with a fully realised character.

More than anything, I started to collect websites to check out, diaries to read - I already have Sylvia Plath's journals from 1950-1962, eagerly purchased after reading 'The Bell Jar.' It's a huge collection of entries, and, much like trying to climb a landslide, I've only previously taken on thirty pages or so before feeling overwhelmed and sliding back down. The physical weight of that book is something alone.

Now that it was more relevant than ever, it would have to be digested. Alongside looking into Anne Sexton, Freud's theory on suicide and David Lester's, 'The 'I' of the storm'.

It's incredible, the ideas which can be generated from a line, or that a slip of dialogue can sew up a huge hole in your plot. Researching is new to me, but I'm already converted. And it's another way to break up the looming monster of a novel; alternating between new writing, re-writing, reading, editing, and researching - expanding on what you're trying to zoom in on.

The bare bones

Now that I had a clear view of the mess in front of me (sort of) I was desperate to untangle. Luckily we'd purchased a massive whiteboard to plan our wedding on, which was brilliant for the next stage. I propped the board up, and used my chapter mapping to put every major event on a post it note in the order it occurred in the novel (even if I knew it would be scrapped.)

At first it looked like this:

It prompted me to think about the timeline of my novel. The inciting incident is that a girl has been missing for 6 months. This didn't seem current enough, so I reduced it to 3 months. Even then, I thought, there's no new evidence, the most exciting part of this book is in the past, and they just talk about it until the last quarter when there's a discovery. So I took that discovery, and I opened the book with it.

It was very easy to pick a post it note up and stick it somewhere else.

But what this meant in reality, was a massive re-structure and even more aspects which now wouldn't work.

For some reason this made me laugh, loudly, for a substantial amount of time.

Then I got back to work.

I reconsidered every event; the order of it, the logic, the transition into the next. I screwed up the ones I hated. I added bridges. I scribbled out and re-wrote. From the Public Edit I attended a few weeks back, there was one piece of advice which really stuck, 'Put the events in your novel in their most dramatic order.' And I used this to guide my re-plotting.

I knew that I needed to decide on the duration, and a month fitted. I chopped the story up into one of four weeks. by splitting up the board:

I added a few thoughts as they occurred and made some big changes, such as:

- I swapped two character's personalities and subplots. I thought it would be more interesting and refreshing if the Dad was teary and struggling, and the Mum was cold and cutting.

-Introduced new characters so that my current ones had friends and jobs, instead of just this intense world with five people.

-I drafted in where the reader would get the big reveals. The book is based on secrets, and I needed to drip feed them through - making sure they were rearing their heads at the right time.

The length was an issue; I had a beginning and end, with the middle spanning 50,000 words. I needed to stretch this to at least 80,000 without the extra 30,000 coming across as desperate polyfiller.

When I looked up from this I'd lost four hours, but gained the skeleton of my book - a fair exchange.