Why research?
How research feeds the sourdough starter of your mind and makes your writing delicious, nutritious, and unique.
Greetings!
Welcome to the first installment of BookSmarts — a newsletter about researching nonfiction writing. In future posts, we’ll get into the nuts and bolts of the research process, like tracking down obscure sources, navigating archival research, and maximizing the searchability of your material (seriously, how did people live before Ctrl+F??). It’s gonna be great!
But before we get to the practical part, I want to spend this first post reflecting on why research is so important to writing in the first place. And I want to do it with a strangely apt bread metaphor. Stick with me.
Research, in my mind, just means learning about your subject. It can involve interviewing sources, visiting historical sites, listening to oral histories, or watching archival footage. It almost always requires reading stuff. Lots of stuff.
That stuff could be old or new, poetic or technical, accurate or flawed. It could be directly related to the subject at hand or connected only by the thinnest philosophical thread. What’s important is that it all goes into your brain, where it ferments like a big bubbling blob of sourdough and emerges fully (or mostly) baked as whatever you ultimately write.
To stretch the metaphor a little further, research provides all the necessary ingredients for baking a hearty nonfiction loaf. At its most fundamental, it supplies the flour: the basic informational sustenance that readers get from consuming a piece of writing. In reported nonfiction, there is no story without research.
Research also furnishes other essentials like salt—the pithy quotes and cocktail-party trivia that, when sprinkled throughout a story, enhance its appeal—and water—the narrative elements that make writing supple and tender, not dense and dry.
Most importantly, though, research feeds the starter of your mind: the teeming goo of themes and questions that reside inside your head and, together with your lived experiences and quirks of cognition, give your writing its distinctive texture and flavor.
Just as the yeast and bacteria in sourdough transform flour, salt, and water into crusty, mouth-watering bread, the metaphorical microbes in your brain digest raw information and turn it into something more than a summary of what you have learned — something that leaves a lasting impression on the audience and speaks to bigger questions about the human condition. Something that only you could ever write. I think that’s even more astonishing than leavened bread.
We’re approaching the limits of my knowledge of sourdough microbiology. But I know that my intellectual starter is a product of all the research I have ever done. Into it, I scrape the sticky residue of ideas that linger long after a project is finished in the hopes that they will shape future work. Like the realization that there is no such thing as untouched nature. And that our perceptions of nature are often warped by colonial biases.
I’ve found that my starter is happiest and most active when I’m feeding it a good diet. That is, when I’m doing research with a clear purpose. That means consuming material with a particular question in mind, like re-reading A Sand County Almanac to see what Aldo Leopold had to say about grass, the subject of my book (a lot, it turns out). It means looking for specific themes or patterns, like how some thinkers equate grass with mortality and others, with immortality.
These are just a few examples from my work, but every writer has had their own experience of double underlining a passage that only jumped out because they came at their research through a specific lens. It’s recognizing when two seemingly unrelated documents have something to say to each other, or discovering that an image or phrase keeps popping up in unexpected places, like the mouse in Goodnight Moon.
These revelations deliver a jolt of electricity — the spark of original thought. The thrilling possibility that you might be the first person to notice some particular symbolism or connection, however minute or esoteric. In this sense, research for writing isn’t so different from scientific research. “Research is to see what everybody else has seen, and think what nobody else has thought,” said the Nobel Prize-winning biochemist Albert Szent-Györgyi. (And yes, I just Googled “famous research quotes” because I thought a post on research should contain at least a modicum of actual research.)
Someday, later, writers will have to figure out how to articulate these thoughts so that someone outside their brain can understand them, just as a baker must shape a loaf of bread when the dough is finally done proofing. But deep in the work of research, I revel in the flash of insight and know that it will leave its mark on the final product one way or another.
That’s why it’s worth all the trouble. And that’s why I wanted to start here today.
Just as research is best done with a clear question in mind, writing about research ought to have a clear aim. And my aim with BookSmarts is to help us all make wonderful creations — bâtards, baguettes, and boules of every shape and size — with the weird, wonderful starters of own minds.
Thanks for bearing with me, and for being here.
Onward!
Julia
