Writing: A tired ramble on research, the perils of. And Experience.
I pulled down good old Chesterfield, who I’ve read so many times I can open him anywhere and sink right in.
Here he is on research versus experience:
The late Duke of Marlborough, who was at least as able a negotiator as a general, was exceedingly knowing in men; whereas the learned Grotius appeared, both in Sweden and in France, to be a very bungling minister. This is, in my opinion, very easily to be accounted for. A man of deep learning must have employed the greatest part of his time in books; and a skilful negoatiator must necessarily have employed the greatest part of his time with man. The sound scholar, when dragged out of his dusty closet into business, acts by book, and deals with men as he has read of them...
Military men have seldom much knowledge of books; their education does not allow it; but what makes great amends for that want is, that they generally know a great deal of the world; they are thrown into it young; they see variety of nations and characters and they soon find, that to rise, which is the aim of them all, they must first please; their concurrent causes almost always give them manners and politeness. In consequence of which, you see them always distinguished at Courts, and favored by the women...
All right, so to be successful we must combine research with experience, right? That means we don’t stint the research. But how far can we trust our research? Even if we think we’ve found the perfect source, so much of the writer's background is hidden from view; it is only in comparison with s whole lot of other reading that we can begin to perceive the prescription of their particular perceptive lens.
Example: Charles Elliott's excellent Princesse of Versailles-a careful, scholarly work forcusing on Marie Adelaide of Savoy, which necessarily depicts the middle years of Louis XIV's reign. In this book we not only see the Bourgognes as they were--bright, charming, and died much too young--but we see the machinations of Louis's bastards by Madame de Montespan, who exerted themselves through social weaponry to offset the influence of Madame de Maintenon.
In Elliott's book, the handsome, bright, utterly immoral bastards come off as wicked, rotten, dissolute creeps, deservedly robbed of power by the hard-working, unswervingly moral Maintenon, whose soul-searchingself-doubts about her position and her duty kept her praying constantly on her knees.
Now, drawing on exactly the same sources, Nancy Mitford writes a charming, deceptively light-toned book about Louis XIV--and in it, the Bourgognes still are charming and witty and dear, but Maintenon comes off as a narrow-minded, bigoted bourgeoise bitch, and the bastards as brilliant, attractive, playful aristocrats who are tragically denied a place in government that their wit and brains otherwise had designed them to fill. The matter of their bastardy? (Gallic shrug here.) Aristocrats do these things. It's understood. But for the middle class bigots to rise above their place? That is unnatural, and brings everyone to disaster.
Mitford's own aristocratic assumptions probably present the court the way it would like to be perceived, and I suspect she gives some real understanding into their thought processes that seems to escape Elliott. But OTOH Elliott seems to see Maintenon as the complex, bright, and driven woman she was.
Using one source for one's fictional background means one is going to unconsciously reflect the views of the author, and however careful the research, there is the inescapable slant of the finite author. So how long does one research until one can get it right?
Much more to the point, how will one know if it's right?
Here are some good thoughts on this matter from the writer (and first-rate researcher) Vladimir Nabokov:
Time and space, the colors of the seasons, the movements of muscles and minds, all these are for writers of genius (as far as we can guess and I trust we guess right) not traditional notions which may be borrowed from the circulating library of public truths but a series of unique surprises which master artists have learned to express in their own unique way. To minor authors is left the ornamentation of the commonplace: these do not bother about any reinventing of the world; they merely try to squeeze the best they can out of a given order of things, out of traditional patterns of fiction.
The various combinations these minor authors are able to produce within these set limits may be quite amusing in a mild ephemeral way because minor readers like to recognize their own ideas in a pleasing disguise. But the real writer, the fellow who sends planets spinning and models a man asleep and eagerly tampers with the sleeper's rib, that kind of author has no given values at his disposal: he must create them himself.
Here he is on research versus experience:
The late Duke of Marlborough, who was at least as able a negotiator as a general, was exceedingly knowing in men; whereas the learned Grotius appeared, both in Sweden and in France, to be a very bungling minister. This is, in my opinion, very easily to be accounted for. A man of deep learning must have employed the greatest part of his time in books; and a skilful negoatiator must necessarily have employed the greatest part of his time with man. The sound scholar, when dragged out of his dusty closet into business, acts by book, and deals with men as he has read of them...
Military men have seldom much knowledge of books; their education does not allow it; but what makes great amends for that want is, that they generally know a great deal of the world; they are thrown into it young; they see variety of nations and characters and they soon find, that to rise, which is the aim of them all, they must first please; their concurrent causes almost always give them manners and politeness. In consequence of which, you see them always distinguished at Courts, and favored by the women...
All right, so to be successful we must combine research with experience, right? That means we don’t stint the research. But how far can we trust our research? Even if we think we’ve found the perfect source, so much of the writer's background is hidden from view; it is only in comparison with s whole lot of other reading that we can begin to perceive the prescription of their particular perceptive lens.
Example: Charles Elliott's excellent Princesse of Versailles-a careful, scholarly work forcusing on Marie Adelaide of Savoy, which necessarily depicts the middle years of Louis XIV's reign. In this book we not only see the Bourgognes as they were--bright, charming, and died much too young--but we see the machinations of Louis's bastards by Madame de Montespan, who exerted themselves through social weaponry to offset the influence of Madame de Maintenon.
In Elliott's book, the handsome, bright, utterly immoral bastards come off as wicked, rotten, dissolute creeps, deservedly robbed of power by the hard-working, unswervingly moral Maintenon, whose soul-searchingself-doubts about her position and her duty kept her praying constantly on her knees.
Now, drawing on exactly the same sources, Nancy Mitford writes a charming, deceptively light-toned book about Louis XIV--and in it, the Bourgognes still are charming and witty and dear, but Maintenon comes off as a narrow-minded, bigoted bourgeoise bitch, and the bastards as brilliant, attractive, playful aristocrats who are tragically denied a place in government that their wit and brains otherwise had designed them to fill. The matter of their bastardy? (Gallic shrug here.) Aristocrats do these things. It's understood. But for the middle class bigots to rise above their place? That is unnatural, and brings everyone to disaster.
Mitford's own aristocratic assumptions probably present the court the way it would like to be perceived, and I suspect she gives some real understanding into their thought processes that seems to escape Elliott. But OTOH Elliott seems to see Maintenon as the complex, bright, and driven woman she was.
Using one source for one's fictional background means one is going to unconsciously reflect the views of the author, and however careful the research, there is the inescapable slant of the finite author. So how long does one research until one can get it right?
Much more to the point, how will one know if it's right?
Here are some good thoughts on this matter from the writer (and first-rate researcher) Vladimir Nabokov:
Time and space, the colors of the seasons, the movements of muscles and minds, all these are for writers of genius (as far as we can guess and I trust we guess right) not traditional notions which may be borrowed from the circulating library of public truths but a series of unique surprises which master artists have learned to express in their own unique way. To minor authors is left the ornamentation of the commonplace: these do not bother about any reinventing of the world; they merely try to squeeze the best they can out of a given order of things, out of traditional patterns of fiction.
The various combinations these minor authors are able to produce within these set limits may be quite amusing in a mild ephemeral way because minor readers like to recognize their own ideas in a pleasing disguise. But the real writer, the fellow who sends planets spinning and models a man asleep and eagerly tampers with the sleeper's rib, that kind of author has no given values at his disposal: he must create them himself.