When research attacks

This post started in my mind when I was talking with a friend, and said, “Although, I must admit--it would be fascinating to have a psychotic break from a research point of view.”

When you have a thought like this, it confirms you are a scientist. Or a writer.

A good writer wants it all to be as accurate as possible. Or, I want it all to be as accurate as possible—I can’t really speak for the rest of you. But if you have ever gotten wasted to experience your character’s hangover, or stood outside in the rain in the middle of a summer storm to see how quickly it takes your underwear to get wet, or tried keeping yourself up to see what hallucinations are like, then you might have a similar madness to my own.

The internet is great for factual research, but when it comes to subjective encounters, nothing beats some personal first-hand experience.

This gets bad when you wonder how your character feels when they accidentally put their foot in their blazing campfire, or has a psychotic break, or takes a tumble down a steep slope.

Have you ever wanted to do some up-close-and-personal research, or does common sense usually get in the way (as it should)?

Have you ever actually done something for the sake of the story? I know I have. It wasn’t pretty.

He who writes with monsters...

Research can be bad too. I mean, it's good to know things, but like some guy once said, "He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you."

Blue Star deals very heavily with death. Very heavily. And I want my deaths to be as accurate as possible, because that's stuff I can't make up, and I just can't allow myself to write stuff like that without doing a little research. Or a lot, as the case may be.

Cocaine is the top illegal import into the United States.

I often joke that I started writing Blue Star so that I wouldn’t have to take up a real drug habit. That shit can be real nasty, yo. Like meth? Yeah, I am never trying that—the visuals they used in middle school of people tearing their skin off with cheese graters and their fingernails and stuff really stuck with me.

Anyway. Blue Star, in the story, is the street name for this drug I made up. It’s first and foremost a hallucinogen like LSD, but it’s got these crazy other properties too. So what do I need to do? Research. As always.

To Google!

And the British have Harold Shipman.

I started Blue Star summer of 2010. There were a few things I had to research to get started.

First and foremost, serial killers, America’s most romanticized sociopaths. I needed to know as much as I possibly could until my attention span ran out. Now, I’m a big fan of murder mysteries—have been for years—so I at least had an idea of what I was getting into writing one. And I knew it was going to be gruesome. (I’m a big fan of Wire in the Blood and Criminal Minds and that sort of thing. Crime dramas are fun!) How gruesome? Gruesome. Serial killers, baby.

So I went to Google. Hey man, don’t judge me. It led me to many websites on serial killers, but the one I remember was the FBI’s website. Yeah, they’ve got one, and it was actually highly informative.

Naturally, I checked out Wikipedia as well. They put things very succinctly, and often have links you can bounce to for further information.

Things blur a little here. I think once I verified I was going to be making a serial killer, I needed to get down to the nitty-gritty and start emulating the masters.

TO WIKIPEDIA!

Yes, good ole Wikipedia. Don’t look at me like that, I’m not doing this for school, it doesn’t have to be cited or anything. Anyway, Wiki is concise and for the most part accurate.

First, I went here, to the list of unidentified serial killers. You know them—Jack the Ripper, the Zodiac Killer, the Original Night Stalker. Well, even the more obscure ones are on here. This is what I needed. These were the guys that got away…how did they do it?

As it turns out, for the most part, they got away because technology was shit and procedures were shit. Look them over. My memory isn’t great, but if I recall correctly a lot of them were working in the times before the computer, our greatest technological boom of recent years. Before the internet, and databases, and INSTANT INSTANT INSTANT. Communication was a little harder back then and information didn’t get around as quickly, and forensics weren’t the same back then either.

Okay, how about the ones that didn’t get away with it? I’m talking big bad guys here: Bundy, Gacy, Dahmer, Berkowitz. Pretty looking bunch of guys, aren’t they? (Well, Bundy, yeah, okay.) There were others I poked at, but I can’t remember them right now except for the Unabomber and Ed Gein. What was I looking for? Everything. Methodology, motives, cooldown periods. These were some bad, fucked up people, and I was going to read all about them. Had to get into the mind of the killer, right?

It was sometime around reading what Dahlmer did to his victims that the weight of their actions suddenly came crashing down. Holy shit. This was disgusting. This was disturbing. This was all kinds of wrong, and the fact that these people had ever done this was wrong, and the fact that people out there would do this was wrong. It was terrible and horrific. (Seriously, go read the articles, and try to imagine plumbing full of rotting human flesh.)

This was grim stuff, and it put me in exactly the kind of mindset I needed.

(As an amusing note, I found a book last year at Barnes and Noble about serial killers, in alphabetical order. Can’t deny I was tempted to buy it.)