Ridiculous research

Sometimes, I find the number of things I feel I need to be conversant in to be able to write a book such as I am/want to write, is so large as to be almost ridiculous.  Anything I talk about likely needs at least some research.

If I’m talking about a normal house, its probably fine, but if I’m talking about a massive ancient temple, I need to answer all sorts of questions to be able to talk about and describe it properly.  Is the place falling apart? Why or why not?  If it is, what parts are most likely to fail?  Doors?  Walls? Ceilings?  Floors?  Support structures (such as pillars)?  Does any of this change when its built free standing? Into a mountain? Underground?  Is it more likely to suffer degradation from water damage or from the sheer passage of time?  If it’s not failing, is it because of materials or design?  If materials, what type of materials last forever, what condition would they be in, and why?  If its design, what does the design look like?  Do gothic temples last better? Or pueblo adobe cliff villages?

And that’s about a topic which most people know very little about, and which we are more likely to be familiar than with some others.  We live, work, shop, and travel in and around buildings most days of our life.  We’ve seen lots of them, see how they get destroyed, and what damage looks like on a building.

So, lets say I’m dealing with combat.  I have never seen combat.  The closest I’ve come would be being in a fight with someone, or else in wrestling.  Needless to say, neither of these two really give me background on the details of combat such as I’d want.  (Fortunately I do have some idea of feelings in and around dangerous situations because of these, and feelings are often harder to research than facts.)  But now, dealing with militaries and warfare, I need to have well defined military structures, weapon systems, tactics and more.  Military structures are a bit easier, partly because we hear about generals, captains, and sergeants in movies more often than we get much information about cavalry charges and phalanx formations.  I’ve talked to officers and enlisted soldiers.  I’ve never met someone who worked in a phalanx.  Weird that.  So I have to know, how fast can a phalanx move?  What sort of equipment would they be carrying for a short or extended deployment?  What does their equipment weigh?  What does it look like?  How does a formation like that move?  When it moves, what are the problems with moving, and how might they be exploited?  What weapons were traditionally used in a phalanx?  Were weapons developed later on which might have been more effective than the normal pike/spear used?  Would a Halberd work better than a pike?  And really, what IS a halberd or a pike?  Why would one or the other have been used?  What were their strengths and weaknesses?

The entire line of questions quickly spirals out of control at that point.  I look up all sorts of things about tanks, artillery, what generals want when making one compared to what designers want.  I look up why the Panzer was better than the Sherman.  Why is the M1A1 a good tank?  Is it just speed?  Armor?  Range?  Electronics systems?  What have they considered for possibly making it better?  What would they like to do with it but haven’t?  How would doing something like putting a missile package on it change its function?

The really NICE thing about writing fantasy is I can look up large amounts of this stuff in Wikipedia.  Yes, it’s possible the stuff is made up on there, but generally nerds who go around making up things on wikis probably aren’t screwing around with what the difference between a glaive and a bill is.  (Both are pole weapons.  A bill is a long hook for dismounting knights while a glaive has a pike-like spike on the end.  It should probably be noted all the questions I’ve asked in this document were not things I want to know, but things which I have already looked up in the past.)  Besides, it’s not like I’m citing my sources.  If I use some thought or idea off a wiki which isn’t entirely correct, I can always call it artistic license.  Still, this adds up to a large amount of time spent reading historical and semi-historical descriptions of old battles which typify certain situations. 

It goes on and on and on.  I read things by some authors and I wonder to myself “Hmm, why would they do X instead of Y?  Did the author even check?”  Any time I find myself wondering about something in my own writing, I go look it up.  Generally this takes between 4 and 16 hours a week.  Many times I will hunt through 30-40 websites looking for references to my topic.  From time to time I find the name of a book discussing what I’m dealing with and then see if it’s at a nearby library for me to go read.

That’s really all I have to say.  It’s ridiculous how much time I spending looking things up, and sometimes I have to wonder how much of it will get used.