Your Research is Showing
Everyone has to do research from time to time. When one reader exclaimed of my early sprawling draft, set in the 1930s and ‘40s: “You sure know a lot about a lot!” I did not take it as a compliment….
Category: Research
When Setting and Story Are One
By Guest Contributor Anjali Mitter Duva. In Rajasthan, a desert state in the northwest of India, many five-year old children have never seen rain. In the winter of 2001, as I prepared for a trip to the fortress city of…
How the Pied Piper of Tucson Led Me to My Story
Some writers keep returning to the story they have to tell until they get it right. When I started my YA novel Half in Love with Death (Merit Press – December 2015), I’d already abandoned two novels about a young…
Historical Fiction: Leap of Faith
In September 2013 I travelled to Texas to research my novel featuring women flying in World War II. Despite reading nearly every account of The WASP (Women Airforce Service Pilots) in print, including memoirs and biographies, newspaper clippings, histories of…
Using Your Killer Head Cold For Character Insight
Last weekend, I was moping around my kitchen. The whole house seemed dreary and disorganized, with unopened mail on the table and dishes in the sink. But even though I knew they were things that needed to be done, my arms…
Personal Artifacts: Researching Your Own History
I was on the phone with my dad the other day, and just before we hung up I said, “Yalla, bye!” This was strange for a number of reasons. First, “Yalla, bye” is a weird phrase. Yalla means “let’s go”…