Research, and fiction

It is an extraordinary thing (although obvious I'm sure to all except me) the way that research informs fiction and changes its direction.

Several years ago, when I was writing a series of Just-Soesque short stories for children, I spent hours in the Zoological Society's library because I wanted the anatomical details of the animals I was writing about to be accurate by the end of the story. I didn't want to mislead my young readers, even in a piece of fiction, because I knew, even then, that if a reader finds something implausible, or worse, just plain wrong, she loses faith with the whole story - even if it's fiction.

In my research I read that a group of camels, seen from a distance
looks like a group of ostrichesand immediately the story changed direction and got itself published in SPIDER (back issues with that story, Ostriches, or the birds nobody noticed, aren't available online).

I've just been transcribing tapes of an interview with a woman who knew my great-grandmother and the things she told me about the friendship between my great-grandfather and my step-great-grandfather have conjured scenes where once there was nothing but sheets of blank white paper ... .

Research is better than inspiration, any day.