Cath Staincliffe

I hate research.  I think, as a writer, that’s probably a minority position.  Most writers seem to relish it, waxing lyrical about libraries and reference books, research trips and source material.

There are three reasons I hate it: it’s tedious, it takes me away from writing and it’s scary.

Tedium first.  I find it very hard to connect to non-fiction, my eyes glaze over and my mind wanders off.  It takes me a week to make it through Saturday’s Guardian – in small chunks at a time.  Practical research is easier than reading – visiting a location to check it out or meeting someone to talk about their area of expertise – but even so it is something I would avoid if I could get away with it. Because…

… My second point – it takes me away from the writing.  I want to tell a story, I invent the characters and a situation, I know roughly where I am going and that’s what sets my heart beating, that’s what gets me up in the morning.  Not another two hours spent on Google and Wikipedia or at the library.

And scary?  Because you can get it wrong!  Fiction is never wrong, it’s only a point of view, an offering which you hope will mean something to other people.  It might be badly written or unsatisfying but it can’t be objectively incorrect.  However research is about facts and figures and dates and procedures that are objective.  Mistakes are possible.

When I started writing I chose a private eye as my protagonist, I based her in Manchester and gave her the problem of juggling work and childcare.  That immediately let me off huge swathes of research as there were no rules whatsoever to being a PI, I lived in Manchester so knew the city well and I was steeped in my own real-life attempts to find a balance between work and home life.  But as I developed as a writer and broadened my horizons, I was drawn to tackling subjects that couldn’t be done without proper, careful research.  So, for example, recently I’ve written fiction or drama about assisted dying and life in a women’s prison, about the Mau Mau rebellion in colonial Kenya, and the way dangerous driving offences are investigated.  The writing couldn’t happen without the research (though I did persuade my partner, who is a history buff, to read some of the books about the Mau Mau for me and mark relevant sections).  The meetings I’ve had with solicitors and women prisoners have been incredibly useful and illuminating and I’m glad that the work I’ve produced is as authentic as I can make it.  But with each new project my heart sinks at the thought of yet more research.

DIY is one of my hobbies and I guess research is a bit like having to get all the gubbins out and prepare the space before you can actually get cracking.  An inescapable, necessary and unrewarding part of the job.

Words are the writer’s medium, the raw material, the building blocks with which we construct our stories.  A follow-on question to, ‘Where do you get your ideas from?’ might well be, ‘Where do you find the words?’  How do we translate that vision in our head, that image in our mind’s eye, that scene, the picture of a character into marks on the page or screen?

For myself it’s an organic process, the words come into my head, sometimes visit my mouth (I shape them as I’m writing, tasting them which must look bizarre and is one reason for not writing in front of an audience) and then they travel down my arm to my hand and through the pen to the page.

As I’ve said before I don’t like to analyse the process of writing too much (superstitious) but as I write I am often automatically seeking out better words to capture what I mean.  My first draft has plenty of crossings out.  A grey sky will become a blank or bleak sky.  ‘How are you?’ will be replaced by, ‘You okay?’ or, ‘How you doing?’  There are dozens of choices as I write.  And a sense of the rhythm of the words, the beat beneath them, figures in there somewhere.

Then there is the Thesaurus.  I love the Thesaurus.  I’m prone to repetition and finding alternative words helps keep that in check and introduces variety into my work.

Sometimes I collect words as I read other people’s books.  If they strike me as particularly eloquent or visceral then I jot them down and when I am tidying up my prose I consider whether there is a good place for any of them.  Often they don’t fit or they don’t suit my style so they languish on the list for the future.

You may have read lots of rules about writing: cut out your adverbs, avoid the passive voice, don’t split infinitives.  None of these rules help me, I ignore them all.  I prefer to rely on my instincts.  And I constantly break a rule that I was taught at school – never start a sentence with ‘and’.  (See what I did there?)  I also have loads and loads of sentences that are not proper sentences even though they start with a capital letter and end with a full stop.  I leave out the subject or the verb or both.  Suffice to say the grammar and style function on my word processor is permanently disabled.

It works for me.

It’s the question writers get asked most.  Sometimes I make a jokey reply: ‘Off a stall in Longsight Market.’  Truth is, I’m a little reluctant to examine too closely how ideas come, I don’t like to analyse my writing process.  For me, writing is about letting go, freeing up my mind to play, create, invent and I fear that too much unpicking of that might make me self-conscious, hamper that flow.  In a similar way, as a reader I don’t want to analyse the books I’m immersed in, I want to suspend disbelief and accept the world of the story and connect with the characters.

What is true for me is that stories come in different ways, some grow from a phrase that triggers a situation, and an idea of character in that situation.  Some follow from seeing an image in my head: dust motes in sunbeams in a hallway, Victorian tiles, the house holds a secret.  Particular books might start more cerebrally – thinking about a theme that seems ripe for exploration or a situation that would petrify me, or even an incident I experience that suggests a parallel in a fictional world.  These are all seeds.  In order to germinate them I need to have a sense that there’s potential in the ‘idea’, which I can only explain as a spark, an excitement; when I consider it my mind goes racing ahead.  But I can’t make real progress until I discover the characters.  I can’t go anywhere until I’ve worked out who the people are, what they’re like and named them.   And then the story, the ideas develop and change as I write.   Like mould or grass or fruits.  What a job, eh?  Love it.

Here’s another unadorned list of my recent reads.  All thoroughly recommended.  Aren’t books great?

Under The Dome by Stephen King

Collecting Cooper by Paul Cleave

The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey

Dominion by CJ Sansom

The Wicked Girls by Alex Marwood

The Betrayal by Helen Dunmore

Life After Life by Kate Atkinson

The Last Warner Woman by Kei Miller

Ghostman by Roger Hobbs

Snowdrops by AD Miller

Today I’ve been along to Fallowfield Library – one of 6 Manchester libraries threatened with closure in the latest round of public service cuts – cuts due to the government’s austerity programme.  (And that’s working really well, isn’t it?)  The meeting room was packed and reflected the wide cross-section of local people who depend on the library and see it as the heart of their community.  From pensioners who meet there and find it a lifeline, a social hub, and who can only attend because it is near enough to walk, to children involved in youth activities  (no youth clubs are left in the area) or who use the computers and other resources for homework.  From students who study there and people who use the library to try and find jobs, to people who need help and advice and know the best place to start is at the library.  Then of course there are the people of all ages who go in to borrow books (including talking books and books in other languages) or DVDs, to read newspapers or get something photocopied.  The clear shared feeling at the meeting was that the library is the heart of the community and that losing it would be a life-blow to community cohesion.  ‘There’ll be nothing left,’ was said and repeated several times.  ‘It’s all we’ve got.’  There are no other community venues in the area and the library supports many local groups who meet there.  Back in June I wrote a piece for The Reading Agency for National Reading Group Day about what libraries mean to me – you can see it here.  Every person at the meeting today and those in libraries across the country will have their own stories to tell about what their library means to them.   And everyone there today who spoke, except the local authority’s Head of Libraries, was totally opposed to the proposals.