Research is fun, but you don’t have to be an expert on a subject to write a realistic story. Instead, learn just enough to make it believable.

by Gretchen McCullough

Doing research is so fun that it is easy to fall down the rabbit hole, swallowed up by vast historical detail. However, it is not necessary to become an expert, but to know just enough to advance your story, create a plausible character or situation, or give the reader a sense of verisimilitude. Russell Banks, the novelist, offers some good advice about doing research for historical novels in his essay “On Research”: “As a fiction writer, one has no need to master a subject, to become an expert on it, or to report or otherwise testify on it later. In fact, quite the opposite.” Novelists use the factual in their storytelling, but the imagination should be the driving force in a novel. The novelist is not a detective, a reporter, or a lawyer.

For example, in my novel Confessions of a Knight Errant: Drifters, Thieves, and Ali Baba’s Treasure, I have a character, an antiquities dealer in Texas, who is selling stolen antiquities from the Middle East. (I live in Cairo and was present during the 2011 uprising, so I was aware of this issue.) But I also wanted to research other countries where this was a problem. In 2003, the Baghdad Museum was looted, and thousands of antiquities from Sumerian, Assyrian, and Babylonian civilizations flooded auctions and found their way to private dealers throughout the world. There was a concerted effort by Interpol, UNESCO, and the U.S. military to recover these objects. Rural Texas might also be a perfect hiding place for a fugitive, trying to evade federal authorities. I also decided to have a valuable manuscript that would tempt a wealthy oilman, who is a collector, working to build a world-class collection of ancient manuscripts at a Texas university.

When doing research, it is not necessary to become an expert, but to know just enough to give the reader a sense of verisimilitude.

I was also interested in what happened to Muammar Gaddafi at the end of his rule. He was frequently ridiculed in the Egyptian press. He was a cruel character, but also comic. I read parts of his Green Book, which details his political philosophy. Sprinkled within this bizarre philosophy are goofy nuggets, like: “Hens like eggs, so do women, and that’s why they should be kept in the shed.” My research inspired a “found letter” in Confessions that details his last days. The other research that I did on Gaddafi involved the U.S.’s bombing of Libyan targets in 1986, in retaliation for a terrorist attack in Berlin. It was rumored that his adopted daughter, Hana, was killed in the attack. But it was never established definitively whether she died or he adopted another daughter and called her by the same name. This led me to the question: what if this adopted daughter was still alive? I decided that she would have a connection with Mary Alice, the American Presbyterian missionary who ran a school in Cairo.

Besides political and historical research, I also needed some practical information. A number of characters work in the camp kitchen in Texas. The owner of the camp, Mary Alice, is constantly fearful of the appearance of USDA inspectors because the camp has already received a warning. That meant I needed to know about the rules and regulations for commercial kitchens. Not surprisingly, pest control and employee sanitation are major issues for inspectors. Mary Alice is vigilant about the presence of cockroaches, but also employee hygiene. The main character, Gary, an academic on the run, suffers because he has to wear a tight hairnet in the kitchen.

While research is pleasurable, at some point, you have to put the kibosh on it and write your novel!

Gretchen McCullough was raised in Harlingen, Texas. After graduating from Brown University in 1984, she taught in Egypt, Turkey, and Japan. She earned her MFA in creative writing from the University of Alabama and was awarded a teaching Fulbright to Syria from 1997–1999. Currently, Gretchen is on the faculty at the American University in Cairo. Confessions of a Knight Errant: Drifters, Thieves and Ali Baba’s Treasure, a novel, was published by Cune Press in the fall of 2022.

Be sure to visit Gretchen at her website.