Ditch Digging
One thing about writing and researching is you can’t do them simultaneously. Not even with two hands and two eyes—Nature conspired to make sure that we use each pair of faculties on one thing at a time, organ playing and parlor tricks notwithstanding. Seeing how I’m ostensibly writing a novel, one set in a period about which I know only a smattering, I’ve got to get me some of that sweet, sweet research, so this week you don’t get you much of that sweet, sweet writing. Sorry not sorry.
I’m not a great researcher but I do enjoy it. The searching part anyway. Not the writing everything down part so much. But there’s definitely something to be said for simply reading old texts. I have whiled away many an hour reading newspapers from the 1940s, or 1840s; magazines from worlds that otherwise are hermetically sealed to us by the grim reaper.
I lack the wherewithal to get myself to the library on anything like a regular basis, which I suppose is to my detriment, but it’s gotten a lot easier to research things on the Internet, so I feel much more comfortable indulging my laziness. Not ten years ago I would have slapped my kids upside both their heads for suggesting that anything of real value could be extracted from Wikipedia and some combination of websites bearing capsule histories of the War of 1812 in language strikingly similar to… Wikipedia.
The Web still has its limits but it contains at least one of the great wonders of our age—one which has largely slipped into our lives in the silence of the night without much fanfare: Google Books. Starting 19 years ago, Google embarked on a project to scan every book in the world. Of 130 million estimated titles, they’ve digitized at least 40 million, which is only 31% of the goal—and the pace has slowed as the lawyers have descended—but it’s still 40 million books. If you read one a day it would take you 110,000 years to read all of them. So perhaps we should just go to war with the library we have rather than the one we wish we had, non?
Of course there’s a limit to how much of it you can read gratis—copyright is a cruel mistress. But there’s a hell of a lot of public domain material, and depending what you’re researching, this can constitute a readily available trove. Such is my case. I’ve been wallowing in the bowels of two 19th century titles, A History of Crime in England by Luke Owen Pike, from 1873, and The Antiquities and Curiosities of the Exchequer by Hubert Hall, Ralph Nevill, and John Lubbock, from 1891. They are both invaluable, as they rely on primary sources I will definitely not be acquiring unless my book is a smash hit and affords me the cash to fly to London and dig through a bunch of 14th century scrolls in some archive somewhere preliminary to fixing all the errors I will certainly be making; and they both provide a wealth of period-specific detail around the incident which is my objective. It never would have occurred to me to even look up “the Octave of St. John the Baptist” or “the Quinzime of Easter.” Is this even English? Well yes, more or less. Perhaps the Catholics among us know about quinzimes. I am certainly happy to make their acquaintance, not only for verisimilitude but also because every door opens to a new room filled with interesting treasures, many of them detailed in Google Books.
So, given this smattering of information, perhaps you can get a step closer to figuring out my subject. I waver over whether to just spill it and make this whole project like those DiY videos on YouTube—How to Serialize a Book Set in Fourteenth-Century England for the Rank Beginner. The desire is, I suppose, a product of the snail’s pace at which the matter is proceeding, combined with a recognition that I can’t keep churning out even desperate, last minute essays about the history of boot laces or the incipient war between NATO and Russia or other important subjects and read about The Cross of Gneith. But the fact that the latter leads one from tenth-century Wales all the way to Oliver Cromwell and his oatmeal-faced Puritan jerk-ass colleagues is as good an indication as any that there’s meat in them there books. I’m going to eat it and get good and strong. Y’all will reap the rewards in good time.
Go go go!