Research

I’ve said before that I’m a researcher with a writing side hustle. I love researching. Reading, documentaries, podcasts, I want to take it all in and learn all I can.

But there is a danger. For research has a tendency to produce ideas, and ideas within the story I’m working on are great. New story ideas which tend to come too freely as is, those can be a danger.

Take for example how many different projects I want to work on now after watching the Great Courses lectures “Understanding Imperial China: Dynasties, Life, and Culture” by  Professor Andrew R. Wilson.

Wilson’s lecture on the Grand Canal and the Tang capital of Chan’an spawned an idea for a trilogy of novels that I would like to write (keeping score that is: 1.) Then his Ming Dynasty lectures got me thinking about how I could fit that in with all the early modern European research I’ve done to work on an incredibly ambitious novel series (2) and some RPG ideas I’d had (3). The lectures on the Soulstealer panic under the Qing almost demands a short story at the least (4) and the Qing lectures rekindled my interests in the Opium Wars and the Taiping Rebellion (let’s generously roll that into just one: 5).

Five is too many projects, though we can put a couple on the back burner and no matter, I’d have to do more research regardless.

Whenever I do research on something I’m not already very familiar with, I start by searching for syllabi for introductory classes to see what texts they are using, what their lecture headings are, and anything else I can glean from their course outline. In this case I also had the handbook for the Great Courses lecture I’d watched, so I went through the bibliography and checked to see how many of the books I could get from the library.

Everything was going well and fitting into the existing projects (minus a few minor battles of will to beat back a few lesser ideas), when I came to a book on the Silk Road. The author talks about an archeologist looking for the Lost City of Niya. Bing. “Lost City” “archeologist” now I want to write a pulpy Indiana Jonesish story (6). The very next sentence in the book, but the Lost City is located in what is now an abandoned nuclear testing area of China. Stop it, goddamn it. Next paragraph: “the Chinese now refer to it as the ‘Steel Road’” because it is “littered with overturned trucks and debris from former Soviet era factories that were carted off to China.” Bing. Bing. To avoid too many additions, let’s keep this at (6) but the pulpy archeologist story is now a Gamma World meets Twilight 2000 RPG idea.

So now the hard part. Putting aside the research and actually picking one project to work on.