Research is the name of the game.
My wife has been reading a novel that is partly set in a hospital. As a nurse, she knows the subject well, and it enrages her when the narrative is spoiled by inaccuracies in the setting or action. I know what she means. I feel the same when I read anything incorrect involving my own area of expertise.
Especially now, when it’s so easy to check your facts before you write.
This got me thinking. I decided it was a good time to talk about how important research is in everything you write. A lack of facts can erode trust; ultimately, it might stop people from reading and enjoying what could otherwise be a great story.
I spend a lot of time and effort making sure that everything in my worlds is based on reality and verifiable facts. It may have been extrapolated and made more futuristic (or re-engineered for an alternative now), but that’s about it.
Let me give you an example.
My Captain Starlight stories all started with a picture prompt on Medium, back in 2024. A 1950s-style woman stood in front of a kitchen stove, with a bored expression.
It all looked very Roy Lichtenstein, although I suspect the picture was AI-generated. Whatever, it was only intended to give people like me a spark of inspiration.
From that picture, a superhero was born. A series of stories about a woman living in America in the 1950s. She discovered on her eighteenth birthday that she could do amazing things. Like Superman, but without all the Kryptonite and exploding planets.
Now you might think that a fortnightly vignette from the life of a housewife/superhero in small-town America wouldn’t need much in the way of research.
As long as it had a sense of fun, a healthy dose of irony and a desire to highlight the way things were changing in society, post-WW2.
Well, you’d be wrong. A whole lot of work was needed to make her seem authentic.
Maybe it’s because of my Autism, but I’ve always had a burning desire to get the details right. I’d hate my first contact with a potential superfan to be a conversation about what I’d got wrong in anything I’d written. If they even replied, I have a feeling that I’d never see them again, rightly so.
You could say that it doesn’t matter so much in my Sci-fi and Steampunk adventures. It’s in the future, or an alternative universe, so as long as it sounds about right and is based on fact, that’ll be fine.
And I must admit, I thought the best thing about writing Sci-fi was that you wouldn’t need to do much research.
Boy, was I ever mistaken.
I soon found that out. I spend loads of time and effort making sure that I create a fully functioning and plausible world for all my stories. Hours of fact-checking can be involved for a single sentence.
When it comes to writing stuff set on Earth at a specific time, like the Captain’s tales, the research part of my mind goes into overdrive.
So, yes, Captain Starlight is only a lighthearted story, but the times are so well documented that all the details of life have to be right to give the narrative any credibility.
Once I started, I found out so much about a time that’s within living memory, but that I didn’t know. And about the differences between a life lived in England and one in America, which are more than you might realise. And because I’m British, I had to make sure that I wasn’t importing my country’s way of doing things.
It takes me a while with every new adventure, but I can honestly say that the food, clothes, the hospitals, the emergency services, and even the gas supply are all authentic and correct for the country and the times. As are the attitudes of the people, which seem strange to us, with our modern perspective.
I loved finding out how life was back then.
The biggest surprise was what there wasn’t, but you would have thought that there must have been. If you know what I mean.
If you’re interested, you can find Captain Starlight’s adventures on my Substack, with a new one published every other week.
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