Research — and its counterpart, worldbuilding — used to be my greatest joy in writing. Recently, I often feel so pressured to add beans to the wordcount, I don’t feel I can afford to luxuriate in research as I used to.

The project I’m working on now is research-intensive. I thought I’d done most of the research already, working on a non-fiction piece.

However, as I’ve  started working on a detailed outline, I’ve realized the needs of non-fiction and fiction diverge greatly. For non-fiction, I mostly needed to know when, where and who. With those facts, I can speculate on why. For fiction I need to answer much more about how. How did it smell? How did it look? How did it taste? Only then can I speculate on how it felt.

My outline/draft so far is peppered with notes to myself: [NEED: description of a fishing ship] All of these notes are promises to myself to do research. 

Characters require research too. Names must fit the culture and period. Every character, even minor ones, needs a rough biography, and the major characters need a study with all their likes, dislikes, habits, childhood friends, mannerisms and so on. These character quirks cannot be simply drawn from my own circle of friends or my own imagination. Neither my personal experience nor my imagination is adequate to the task. I need to read real biographies, and draw inspiration from those. More research.

My husband points out I could research forever and never be satisfied. He may be right. But I’ve also found research to be the best antedote to writer’s block. Sometimes, after deep reading of some fascinating culture, historical event or real person, I find myself so inspired I have to write down my own response, transformed into fiction.

How much research do you do in order to write your stories?

I have a confession. Tara Maya is a pen name. My real name has a lot of syllables. I decided ages ago — in my year abroad in college, to be precise — I needed a pen name. Mostly I was too shy to face the idea of anyone knowing I was an author, but partly I thought a nice, short name could be written in a larger font on a paperback. 😉

I’m over the shyness and who even knows if there will still be paperbacks by the time any of my writing sees print. Furthermore, I discovered the downside to a pen name. It isn’t your real name. I know. Duh. But I wasn’t thinking about the importance of social networking, or any other kind of marketing, back when I decided to start writing under a pseudonym. 

Why not just start using my real name? Well, for one thing, now I’m married, so that’s changed anyway. Another thing, I’ve been participating in writer’s groups, submitting to agents and have even been published under Tara Maya. To the extent anyone knows I exist as a writer at all, they know me as Tara Maya.

Oh, right, unless of course they know me by my other pen name. Yeah, I have two. I’ve published under that one too. I have a blog for the other pen name too, but I hardly ever write in it (what, hardly ever? well, never) because I prefer to write in this blog.

Therein lies the other big problem with pen names. The more you have, the more time you have to spend separately marketing each one. What a bother.

On to my question. Should I write my new book under a different name — my real name, for instance?

I know, I know, I just said it was a bother to have more than one, so why would I want three?

One word: genre.

As Tara Maya, I write science fiction and fantasy. My other pen name writes steamy romance. The new book I’m working on isn’t in either of those genres. It’s a mainstream novel. Historical, I suppose, would be the closest genre, although this particular book only takes place about ten years ago.

Any thoughts?

(The art is by roz-red from deviant art.)

I’m working on 

New York Times, March 23, 2009, 5:13 am 

An ‘Age of Commodified Intelligence’

Today’s idea: We are in an “age of commodified intelligence” — a time not of great enlightenment but of mere intellectual acquisition and credential-building lacking in deep understanding. 

Culture | The magazine Intelligent Life recently put forth the contrarian notion that we are in age not of dumbing down but of smartening up — an “age of mass intelligence” characterized by rises in attendance at museums, literary festivals, operas and so forth.

But now comes a reader’s contrarian argument to that contrarian argument: We are actually only in an “age of commodified intelligence” — a “time of conspicuously consumed high culture in which intellectual life is meticulously measured and branded” but generally without true appreciation, writes George Balgobin.

“Facebook is devoted to cataloguing this cultural rebirth,” he adds. “Here people curate their personas and project them at the world.” Yes, the lights are on, but is anybody home? [More Intelligent Life]

http://ideas.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/23/an-age-of-commodified-intelligence/?ex=1253419200&en=785d12f10c047ad3&ei=5087&WT.mc_id=BL-D-I-NYT-MOD-MOD-M087-ROS-0309-L2&WT.mc_ev=click

I have an idea.

I have ten thousand ideas for stories, in fact, which is why I love this lightbulb picture. There are many bulbs, but last night one in particular flared to life.

I needed to start a new novel, one from scratch (there’s a reason, but I’ll save that story for another time — it’s secret for now), so I trawled through my notebooks to revisit those dottings every writer has. You know the ones I mean, those odd wisps of inspiration which wake you up after a vivid dream of flying, or make you pull over the car on the freeway near the emergency call box, or have you ignoring everything your boss just said to you in the meeting because you had to write it down here, now on the notes to the power point presentation. I have a few of these every day. I’ve shared  a few. There are many, many more.

These dottings are like bottlecaps. One or two is never enough to send in for the prize. You have to keep collecting them. Some will never go anywhere except that cobweb space between the back of your couch and the wall, along with your Canadian penny and the left leg of a McDonald’s Happy Meal toy.

Character. Setting. Plot. For an idea collection to add up to a real outline for a story, I need two of out three; I can then fill in the third. A truly, truly dazzling inspiration will be born, whole and complete, with all three.

My idea last night was truly, truly dazzling.

I wish I could share it with you. (I even designed a cover for it already.) But it’s still too newborn. And I’m not sure I deserve it yet. As I said last night, I’ve had the inklings of this idea before — I had a Setting — but I felt inadequate to the task of writing it.

What changed last night? Very simply, I realized I knew the four characters who must be in the story. Once I knew the characters — since I already had the setting — I only needed a plot, which in turn, was obvious simply by drawing lines between the characters to connect them.

Do you believe there are Platonic Ideals of stories? Somewhere, somehow, there is the perfect version of your story; if you were only a good enough writer, you would be able to give the Platonic Form a Tangible Form. Though your version of the story would never be as beautiful as the Real story, it would at least reflect it, like water holds the moon.