What Creative Research Is and How To Use It

The only things I can't write about are things that I am ignorant about, and that can always be changed. — Jacob Bateman, poet

Somewhere in our schooling, the idea of research got separated from our creative impulse. The kids who went into science do research. Maybe the historians and social scientists, too. And, of course, we all suffered through writing the required "research" paper in high school or college, in which we rounded up a specified number of reputable sources to splint the bones of our argument. And maybe journalists need to quote sources for the sake of credibility. But poets? Novelists? Personal essayists? Don't we just reach deep into the well of our imaginations and subconscious minds and produce art? Well, not exactly. Sometimes it's not enough simply to peer intently into your own soul. Sometimes you have to look out the window and see the world in all its complicated glory.

Think of Rita Dove's haunting book of poems, Thomas and Beulah, based on the lives of her African American grandparents. True, she achieves poetic power by imagining herself into their lives and by creating a living sense of them for us on the page. But to do that, she first had to discover all she could about them. Her declared intent was to remind us that these were real people, that their lives actually happened and were not just artistic constructs, that those lives contained both mystery and beauty along with hardship and suffering. Drawing from the actual known details of their lives would honor them. Think, too, of Carolyn Forché's mesmerizing book of poems, The Country Between Us, based on her experience on the ground during the time of the death squads and impending war in El Salvador, using poetry to try to understand the savagery she witnessed — and make it known to the world in a more powerful and lasting form than a daily news story.

Lavonne J. Adams had published scores of personally inspired poems before she wrote an enchanting cycle of poems about women on the Santa Fe Trail, Through the Glorieta Pass — a breakthrough experience that opened up a whole new dimension in her poetry. A simple assignment that she gave to her poetry class prodded her to venture so far afield in search of subject matter — an assignment designed to jar students away from writing only what was familiar and comfortable. She describes the experience this way:

Students of poetry, in the initial stages of the development of their craft, often write about their own experiences, which is an unarguable means of claiming authority in the writing. During a semester in which an intermediate workshop group shared an inordinate number of poems about romance-gone-awry, I pondered ways that I might encourage them to consider other topics. I wondered if shifting from subjects in which they had a strong emotional stake, to others that might be less personally inspired or traumatic, would allow these poets the distance that they need to focus on craft. My hypothesis was that they could then return to more personal poetry with greater insight and mastery over imagery, language, voice, and form.

Adams goes on, "The assignment was simple: choose a topic and research, write a poem about that topic. I began to write in this vein along with my students, delighted in the temporary liberation from my own life, or thoughts on life in general, within my poetry."

Like so many writers, Adams often finds that the surprises, even the disappointments, inherent in research often turn out to be the most inspiring moments. As she recounts:

Though I've found that traveling for the sake of research isn't a necessity, it can certainly enrich the experience for the author, as well as provide another level of engagement in the resulting creative work.

For example, while investigating the life and art of Georgia O'Keeffe, I was able to take a brief trip to Lake George, New York, where O'Keeffe and husband Alfred Stieglitz spent many summers. My first day there, I wandered the heart of the village, examining buildings, noting trees, the way light struck the lake and the surrounding mountains. I was frustrated when an unexpected afternoon storm swept across the lake, forcing me to take shelter. The next day, I visited a quaint brick building with spires, the former county courthouse, which now houses the Lake George Historical Association & Museum. There, I studied artifacts, read placards that described how quickly storms formed, the impressive number of resulting wrecks found lying at the bottom of the lake. When I saw a photograph of O'Keeffe's painting, Storm Cloud, Lake George, all of these elements combined to create a rendition of an ill-fated afternoon on the lake, when Stieglitz and O'Keeffe witnessed two boys drown. Adams gains an important grounding in such factual events, but ultimately the facts are only as interesting as the poet can make them, as she turns them into something larger and more meaningful, actions and images that resonate beyond the historical moment and even beyond the poem. She says, "But real authority is something more craft-oriented — the engagement of the poet with the subject matter."

When Stephen Crane wrote his novel The Red Badge of Courage, the Civil War was already settled history. His research took place at the feet of old veterans reminiscing on porches, and he listened carefully. When he wrote "The Open Boat," a short story, he was drawing on his own (unintended) research of being shipwrecked off Florida while en route to cover the rebellion in Cuba in 1896. In fact, he first wrote a reportorial nonfiction account of the incident and then shaped the raw material of fact into fiction. Mark Twain earned direct personal experience as a riverboat pilot, but he also closely — and intentionally — observed legendary river men like Horace Bixby to write Life on the Mississippi. Ted Conover rode the rails across America for a season to find out about the hobo life by living it for his book Rolling Nowhere, as complete an immersion experience as one can imagine. Later he reprised part of his hobo trip with his grown son, adding a new lens to the experience — and also using the journey to deepen his understanding of fatherhood.

It's not hard to come up with a pretty impressive list of writers of all genres who intentionally addressed public events, history, science, technology, and all manner of other subjects through research, including deliberately creating an experience to write from. The nonfiction writers are obvious: Tracy Kidder...