Diary of a Mad Editor

I have to confess that I’m one of those writers who loves to do research. Whether it’s for an essay or a short story or even a blog post, I will do an exhaustive amount of research on even the tiniest details. Even if I don’t end up using 99.9% of the research material I collect. I have files and files of material on all kinds of things. Some days, I can blow an entire day looking up information on the Internet. For example, I have these two stories in the pipeline that both involve the use of spotlights. The first story is a short novel — a neo noir. The second is a dark comedy about this guy who plays an increasingly nasty series of pranks on his neighbor. The hook is that the guy used to be married to the neighbor’s wife. The story is told from the perspective of the local hardware store owner who sell the guy the equipment for his pranks. One of those pranks involves a spotlight and a loud speed metal band.

It occurred to me that, while I know a fair amount about heavy metal music, I’ve never actually used a spotlight. And I’m not really talking about some crappy, glorified flashlight you’d buy at K-mart, either. I’m talking about an industrial-strength Golight like something they might use on a construction site or at a military checkpoint in Iraq. So, I do what I usually do and I looked it up in Google. I clicked on the first website and it was an online store that specializes in selling the very item I had in mind. Lots of products with lots of images. The specifications for each product was satifactory and the testimonials (if they are to be believed) substantiated my supposition that these are the kind of thing one might find in the military or by police or in construction. I printed out several pages of information and stuck them in a folder. I now had a new resource that I could refer to not only for the two projects I was working on, but for others in the future that I’d yet to think of.

It may seem like a silly matter to invest so much time in a tiny detail, but it’s the tiny details which ultimately create a sense of reality in a story. Screwing up even one detail in a story can hinder a reader from accepting the fictional reality and call unwanted attention to every other flaw in a story.