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Hide your research
Right, so at this point you're asking, "What is this bitch's deal?" You've done all of this research for a story, and now you want to show that you've done the work, right?
One of the loveliest comments I ever got was for the research I did for another Jurassic Park fanfic. This is all![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
randomslasher 's wise advice. I have nothing to do with it, I just smile and nod and think she's awesome. The reply I gave her was lost to eternity, but here is her response, which more than makes up for whatever I had to say.
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Right, so at this point you're asking, "What is this bitch's deal?" You've done all of this research for a story, and now you want to show that you've done the work, right?
One of the loveliest comments I ever got was for the research I did for another Jurassic Park fanfic. This is all
randomslasher 's wise advice. I have nothing to do with it, I just smile and nod and think she's awesome. The reply I gave her was lost to eternity, but here is her response, which more than makes up for whatever I had to say....That's exactly what I think about research. I've been involved in fandoms that require a good bit of knowledge about one thing or another--most notably Scrubs, where extensive medical jargon is pretty commonplace--and it's really, really obvious to me when an author doesn't know what she's talking about. But even more obvious (and more painful, in my opinion) is when an author has done just enough research to scrape by--and flaunts that research as though they've uncovered the crux of the entire field. The way I figure it, anything you can uncover in a three minute google search is probably so basic and commonplace that your characters will sound LESS educated by even bringing it up than they would by not saying anything at all. It'd be like an aviation expert taking the time to mention, either in dialogue or POV prose, that due to aerodynamics, airplanes can fly. It might sound smart to a layperson, but to a real expert in the field, it's so painfully obvious that you have to worry about the person who said it. When you're truly an expert, you take most of your knowledge for granted, and a lot of people seem to miss that.
I think research is a lost art, personally, and it's extremely refreshing to see someone taking the time out to do it, and do it well. You have to educate yourselves, if not as well as your characters, then at least to the point that you can make them sound intelligent. I'll make note of a specific scene in your story by way of example:
"Sorry, did you have a question?"
She put down her backpack and sighed. "I don't know a good way to memorize these superorders." She got out her homework. "Like plesiosaur. How do I know where to start-"
"Plesiosaur." Billy was about to leave, but stopped by the table when he heard her voice. "That's uh… that's a familiar one, right? It was um, aquatic. So it would be one of the flipper ones. Optery-something. There's like, two of them. Bird and lizard. Ichthy and…saur? Man, three years of Greek down the drain."
In this scene, you had a character who was ostensibly a graduate student in paleontology asking a question. But in order to make it a question that a graduate student in the field would actually ask, it had to be researched well enough that you knew what that level of student would already know. You couldn't just have her walk in and say something like, "Hey, Dr. Grant, what period did the tyranosaurus live in?" because that, while it might not be something a layperson would know off-hand, is something that no graduate student wouldn't be able to answer already. And Billy's response was believable as something he'd once known well enough to have forgotten. He didn't jump in with a copy-pasted response found on wikipedia. I believed that he'd once known this, and had simply been too far removed to piece it all back together perfectly.
That's the real heart of the matter, I think--making someone sound like they know MORE than they're saying, rather than less. I believed Billy had an extensive knowledge of the things he was talking about, and more, because he didn't flaunt two or three facts proudly. Rather, he discussed a few topics that happened to come up, in an appropriate, believable way, and when he was done, he was done. There was no, "Wait, come back!! I have something else intelligent-sounding to say, which might or might not actually be related to the topic at hand, but dammit I wanna get it in here because I spent the time to RESEARCH it!" moment, which comes up so terribly often in half-assed pieces. Again: no research at ALL is often better than just enough to get by (or way too basic, or way too irrelevant), in terms of making a fic look and sound credible.
I think research is a lost art, personally, and it's extremely refreshing to see someone taking the time out to do it, and do it well. You have to educate yourselves, if not as well as your characters, then at least to the point that you can make them sound intelligent. I'll make note of a specific scene in your story by way of example:
"Sorry, did you have a question?"
She put down her backpack and sighed. "I don't know a good way to memorize these superorders." She got out her homework. "Like plesiosaur. How do I know where to start-"
"Plesiosaur." Billy was about to leave, but stopped by the table when he heard her voice. "That's uh… that's a familiar one, right? It was um, aquatic. So it would be one of the flipper ones. Optery-something. There's like, two of them. Bird and lizard. Ichthy and…saur? Man, three years of Greek down the drain."
In this scene, you had a character who was ostensibly a graduate student in paleontology asking a question. But in order to make it a question that a graduate student in the field would actually ask, it had to be researched well enough that you knew what that level of student would already know. You couldn't just have her walk in and say something like, "Hey, Dr. Grant, what period did the tyranosaurus live in?" because that, while it might not be something a layperson would know off-hand, is something that no graduate student wouldn't be able to answer already. And Billy's response was believable as something he'd once known well enough to have forgotten. He didn't jump in with a copy-pasted response found on wikipedia. I believed that he'd once known this, and had simply been too far removed to piece it all back together perfectly.
That's the real heart of the matter, I think--making someone sound like they know MORE than they're saying, rather than less. I believed Billy had an extensive knowledge of the things he was talking about, and more, because he didn't flaunt two or three facts proudly. Rather, he discussed a few topics that happened to come up, in an appropriate, believable way, and when he was done, he was done. There was no, "Wait, come back!! I have something else intelligent-sounding to say, which might or might not actually be related to the topic at hand, but dammit I wanna get it in here because I spent the time to RESEARCH it!" moment, which comes up so terribly often in half-assed pieces. Again: no research at ALL is often better than just enough to get by (or way too basic, or way too irrelevant), in terms of making a fic look and sound credible.
Seriously, just anything this woman says ever. Articulate, relevant, to the point. Amazing. I have nothing more to add.
