Anatomy of a writing research task
Friday, February 4th, 2011 11:36 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lizvogelA friend of mine is struggling with getting started on the research for her story, so I thought I would describe a typical research session for my own work. I may regret pulling back the curtain like this; part of good writing is making it sound like you know what you're talking about even when you don't. But here goes:
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
So I sat down to Google the name of one of my characters. And sure enough, I'm going to have to change it, because I inadvertently named him after a fairly well-known terrorist. (This is why I do a Google-check on names: my brain is far better at storing random bits of data than it is at cataloging and cross-referencing them.)
I know my character is Arabic, but that's a pretty wide field. I start by skimming a couple of articles about the guy with the same name; maybe I'll find a good tip. There's a brief mention of Yemen. Hmm, I've been wondering about Yemen for a while; it frequently turns up when I'm reading about other things, but never more than a brief mention. (Well, prior to about a week ago, anyway. Apparently I'm trendy.) That silence is starting to seem significant. I know nothing about Yemen, so I start with the Wikipedia article about it. Hmm, struggling economy, civil unrest, repressive government -- sounds perfect for my character's backstory. Yemen owns a bunch of islands in the Red Sea... what does a lousy domestic economy and a bunch of islands on a major trade route spell? That's right -- pirates! Excellent! The Hadhrami people, one of the many ethnic sub-groups in Yemen, have a long sea-faring tradition and were known for being traders with India and SE Asia -- which can be a perfectly legitimate business, but can also be a polite way to say pirates! And what's a black-market information broker but a modern-day pirate in a business suit?
So my character is now a Hadhrami from Yemen (and is probably of the opinion that Yemen is a fine place to be from).
Total time-on-task thus far: maybe 3 hours, including writing email, dealing with cats, and all the usual interruptions.
Now comes the tedious part: Finding a big enough list of Hadhrami names that I can pick something I like the sound of. Unfortunately, the usual name sites aren't specific enough for my purposes. Ordinarily I'd look for something like a local phone directory, but this is one case in which primary sources are of no help; I don't read Arabic at all. Hmm, Googling "Yemen" brought up the BBC country profile; I like the BBC, so clickey-clickey. At the bottom of the Beeb page there are links to Yemen news sources, including the English-language Yemen Times. Clickity. Browse, browse... hey, search function! Search on Hadhrami. Read a lot of articles.... Back to the Beeb, and the link for the Yemen Observer. More articles.... Google "Yemen Hadhradi names", more articles.... A lot of interesting stuff about the ethnic/cultural group in general, but very few individual's names. And a real shortage of "ordinary folks" specifically identified as Hadhrami. (I don't know the culture well enough to reliably tell Hadhrami names from other Yemeni names, and I'd rather name my character after someone a little more obscure than the head of the Yemen Socialist Party.)
Finally get a clue and Google "Hadrami Yemen merchants". (Wikipedia aside, "Hadrami" seems to be the most common spelling.) They're a trading people, after all. Along with a lot of the same general articles, get an article that interviews Hadrami restaurant owners in Malaysia and mentions several common family names. From the Yemen Times, oddly enough. (While I don't ordinarily think much of man-on-the-street inserts in news articles, they're just the ticket for name-picking.) And an article mentioning various officials in other countries who are of Hadrami descent. And a couple more Wikipedia entries with names and name lists.
Total additional time: Maybe 2 hours? Lots of cat-playing and misc. web-surfing interspersed.
And that's enough to be going on with. Honestly, it's not all that vital that I get a specifically Hadrami name; plot-wise, it doesn't matter where this character is from (he's not operating on his home turf in the story, and he's not a POV character), and I probably won't even specify that he's Hadrami. All this backstory is just for me. Obviously it would be good to have the name vetted by someone who knows more of the source culture than I do before going to publication (the ultimate goal with this story), but for internal purposes, as long as I get a believably Arabic name, I'm golden.
Some useful URLs:
http://www.yemen-today.com/go/culture/7806.html:
http://www.worldlingo.com/ma/enwiki/en/Hadhramaut:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_Singaporean#Notable_Arab_Singaporeans
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Hadhrami_people
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hadhrami_people
And then, having done a simple search and replace, I of course discover that the replacement name I've chosen has a very different sound in context of the text (it seemed similar in isolation), and it totally messes up the flow. So back to the research sources (this is why you keep a list of the best sites!) for a second-choice name. Sigh.
On the other hand, it gives me an excuse to request from the library a certain very interesting-sounding book that keeps getting linked from various sites (just in case it has something better). In my world, that's a bonus. So now I'm reading Hadrami Traders, Scholars and Statesmen in the Indian Ocean 1750s-1960s, which would otherwise have been a digression from the work I really need to be doing -- but I need to name this character, don't I? So it's not procrastination, it's research!
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
So I sat down to Google the name of one of my characters. And sure enough, I'm going to have to change it, because I inadvertently named him after a fairly well-known terrorist. (This is why I do a Google-check on names: my brain is far better at storing random bits of data than it is at cataloging and cross-referencing them.)
I know my character is Arabic, but that's a pretty wide field. I start by skimming a couple of articles about the guy with the same name; maybe I'll find a good tip. There's a brief mention of Yemen. Hmm, I've been wondering about Yemen for a while; it frequently turns up when I'm reading about other things, but never more than a brief mention. (Well, prior to about a week ago, anyway. Apparently I'm trendy.) That silence is starting to seem significant. I know nothing about Yemen, so I start with the Wikipedia article about it. Hmm, struggling economy, civil unrest, repressive government -- sounds perfect for my character's backstory. Yemen owns a bunch of islands in the Red Sea... what does a lousy domestic economy and a bunch of islands on a major trade route spell? That's right -- pirates! Excellent! The Hadhrami people, one of the many ethnic sub-groups in Yemen, have a long sea-faring tradition and were known for being traders with India and SE Asia -- which can be a perfectly legitimate business, but can also be a polite way to say pirates! And what's a black-market information broker but a modern-day pirate in a business suit?
So my character is now a Hadhrami from Yemen (and is probably of the opinion that Yemen is a fine place to be from).
Total time-on-task thus far: maybe 3 hours, including writing email, dealing with cats, and all the usual interruptions.
Now comes the tedious part: Finding a big enough list of Hadhrami names that I can pick something I like the sound of. Unfortunately, the usual name sites aren't specific enough for my purposes. Ordinarily I'd look for something like a local phone directory, but this is one case in which primary sources are of no help; I don't read Arabic at all. Hmm, Googling "Yemen" brought up the BBC country profile; I like the BBC, so clickey-clickey. At the bottom of the Beeb page there are links to Yemen news sources, including the English-language Yemen Times. Clickity. Browse, browse... hey, search function! Search on Hadhrami. Read a lot of articles.... Back to the Beeb, and the link for the Yemen Observer. More articles.... Google "Yemen Hadhradi names", more articles.... A lot of interesting stuff about the ethnic/cultural group in general, but very few individual's names. And a real shortage of "ordinary folks" specifically identified as Hadhrami. (I don't know the culture well enough to reliably tell Hadhrami names from other Yemeni names, and I'd rather name my character after someone a little more obscure than the head of the Yemen Socialist Party.)
Finally get a clue and Google "Hadrami Yemen merchants". (Wikipedia aside, "Hadrami" seems to be the most common spelling.) They're a trading people, after all. Along with a lot of the same general articles, get an article that interviews Hadrami restaurant owners in Malaysia and mentions several common family names. From the Yemen Times, oddly enough. (While I don't ordinarily think much of man-on-the-street inserts in news articles, they're just the ticket for name-picking.) And an article mentioning various officials in other countries who are of Hadrami descent. And a couple more Wikipedia entries with names and name lists.
Total additional time: Maybe 2 hours? Lots of cat-playing and misc. web-surfing interspersed.
And that's enough to be going on with. Honestly, it's not all that vital that I get a specifically Hadrami name; plot-wise, it doesn't matter where this character is from (he's not operating on his home turf in the story, and he's not a POV character), and I probably won't even specify that he's Hadrami. All this backstory is just for me. Obviously it would be good to have the name vetted by someone who knows more of the source culture than I do before going to publication (the ultimate goal with this story), but for internal purposes, as long as I get a believably Arabic name, I'm golden.
Some useful URLs:
http://www.yemen-today.com/go/culture/7806.html:
http://www.worldlingo.com/ma/enwiki/en/Hadhramaut:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_Singaporean#Notable_Arab_Singaporeans
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Hadhrami_people
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hadhrami_people
And then, having done a simple search and replace, I of course discover that the replacement name I've chosen has a very different sound in context of the text (it seemed similar in isolation), and it totally messes up the flow. So back to the research sources (this is why you keep a list of the best sites!) for a second-choice name. Sigh.
On the other hand, it gives me an excuse to request from the library a certain very interesting-sounding book that keeps getting linked from various sites (just in case it has something better). In my world, that's a bonus. So now I'm reading Hadrami Traders, Scholars and Statesmen in the Indian Ocean 1750s-1960s, which would otherwise have been a digression from the work I really need to be doing -- but I need to name this character, don't I? So it's not procrastination, it's research!
