When Not to Do Any More Research (Cecilia Peartree)

I wrote something here about my work in progress, a kind of alternate history mystery, a few months ago, and it is still in progress today.  This is not because it's ridiculously long - nothing I write will ever exceed about 80,000 words, and ideally I like to wrap everything up way before that - but because in more or less every chapter there is something I need to research, and the things I imagine I need to research have now descended to a level of fine detail that is actually anathema to someone like me. When I studied history, some years ago now, I realised I didn't want to know any of the detail, as I was very much more interested in broad generalities - the great sweeping movements of history, not where the Duke of Wellington had his hair trimmed (I leave that kind of thing to Georgette Heyer).

Of course there is no escape from some of the fine detail when you're writing a novel, and when researching almost anything it's often by building up the layers of detail that you can paint a true picture of something larger. So I have done quite a bit of family history research over the years, mostly in Scotland, and although it can be frustrating to spend hours deciphering Kirk Session minutes, there's no doubt that you can get a better idea of how your ancestors lived once you appreciate the fact that Church of Scotland ministers, especially in rural parishes, interfered in many aspects of people's lives that they wouldn't even consider any of their business today. 

In the case of this particular novel, the research is complicated by the fact that I've started from an incident that could have changed history quite substantially, so I am having to look at old maps, for instance, with that in mind. Yes, this was what the railway network in Britain looked like in the real 1870s and 1880s, but would it have looked the same if there had been a hiatus in railway building earlier in the century? And to what extent would steamships have replaced sailing ships by then if something had happened to frighten people away from steam?

However, as I realised only this morning, there have to be limits to the research, and sometimes it's possible just to skim over something without even having to describe it properly. I think this revelation was probably the result of my having woken up in the middle of the night worrying about where my two main characters were going to have breakfast, some time in the late 1880s, in between disembarking from a ship at a quayside in Aberdeen and boarding a train at the nearby railway station. Having breakfast, or not as the case may be, is just not important enough to the story for me to spend hours looking at old maps* for a suitable venue for them to eat at and then trying to find out what form the meal might take. I suppose if the novel were pure history or historical romance, this might be more significant than it is when the characters are actually heading for a confrontation with the villain in the case, somebody who might or might not be known to them already.

*The blame lies partly with the National Library of Scotland and their amazing digitised map collection, available online.