How do you know when you need research?
Memoirs (and often, personal essays) use the same techniques as fiction and poetry - dialogue, metaphor, musicality, characterization, objective correlative, narrative arc, etc. And since memoirs and essays are often based on personal experiences, they use familiar settings and characters. For these and other reasons, it can sometimes seem strange to use research as part of the writing process. Maybe even stranger to include it in the final product.
For me, research is not only essential, it is my inspiration. It fuels my work, ignites my curiosity, and helps me reach out beyond my private experiences. Once, while writing an essay about wireless technology, I became interested in the effect of remote controls, cell phones, and RFID on my sense of touch. I wondered if senses could fade without use, and if intimacy might mean something else in the brave new world around the corner. I began to research experiments on touch, as well as new developments in RFID. This led to a deeper interest in the overall implications of RFID on privacy, architecture, and the urban experience. Which led to an interest in security architectures. The research has led me to new and unfamiliar terrain, and yet, I remain grounded in personal experience. As I research, I write down intuitive connections between abstract questions and concrete memories and details. It is as if my left and right brain are whispering back and forth, and I am listening in. So in my case, the answer is that I always need research. My process would not be the same without it.
But what about when you start with experience? When your process is not initially inspired by research?
When I was a kid, I watched my grandmother die slowly from eight tumors in her brain. At night, she would scream about the window above her bed, demanding to know whether the latch was locked. She believed her spirit could not escape through a sealed window, that her ghost would be trapped here on earth for all eternity. She swatted invisible insects, yelled names, then gagged on her own spit. Her jaw twisted as she lost control of her facial muscles. Later, she was forced into the hospital, where nurses used a small vacuum to clean spit from her mouth and throat.
I wanted to tell her story, but cancer had become the ultimate cliche. How could I find a way to make the experience meaningful? How could I relate it to something outside our family? Research. I learned about the areas of the brain her tumors destroyed - their functions and pathologies, what happens when they fail. These biological processes led to questions about nerves and cells, which led me to nutrition, and back to the strange foods grandma cooked in her rural house - right on the edge of several farms. Suddenly, everything connected. Probably only half of this research made it into the essay, but I needed it all for the process.
So how do you know when to do this? When your story is too insular or familiar. When you want it to mean more than it already does. When you want it to expand. When you suspect the story points somewhere else - somewhere unexpected. When you have questions that are not answered by just the facts.
But using research is not the same as using an expert witness. The expert witness actually appears in the writing - not just in the process. This will be the subject for the next post.