Writing fiction is wonderful for mapping the contours of your ignorance.

I like to give my fictional people a solid footing in reality: a place, a profession, a relatable problem they’re trying and/or failing to deal with. After all, I enjoy reading fiction that informs as well as entertains, and I try to write fiction that I would enjoy to read.

Our real world is interesting enough for me: I don’t need to build new ones.

So I need realistic detail in the things that my characters do, both for a living and to find personal fulfilment. By inclination and for practical reasons, I tend to pick activities I have first-hand knowledge of.

Thus sourdough-baking, banjo-playing, bee-keeping, scythe-mowing, German-speaking, sailing sculptors are probably over-represented in my work, compared to the demographic mean.

Even so, I rarely get half a page written without needing to check facts.

We have such wonderful research tools these days, but sometimes Wikipedia plus YouTube videos, Facebook groups, obscure member forums and how-to websites just aren’t enough. Neither are books — and good grief I have some obscure titles on my bookshelves. Archaeology of the Chinese Fishing Industry in Colonial Victoria, anyone?

Go see!

Secondary sources are great — but sooner or later, you need to go see for yourself. Be in the place. Talk face-to-face with people who do the thing you’re writing about.

My two current stories on Substack — they will make up the two halves of a novel — are set in Tasmania.

For those unfamiliar with my country, that’s the Ireland-sized island to the south of the mainland. Mountainous, forested, swept by the Roaring Forties. With a population less than Dublin City, or the Wichita metro area. To get there from my home in coastal Victoria, you need to cross 250 miles of often stormy sea.

Audrey Liza concerns a man, a mine electrician, who has bought an old wooden fishing boat sight-unseen on the internet, untroubled by the fact that he has no seafaring experience. Specifically, he has bought a crayboat, a ‘cray’ or ‘crayfish’ being to an Aussie what the rest of the English-speaking world calls a ‘rock lobster’.

The Last Orchard concerns a woman, an environmental scientist, who has inherited an inaccessible and unprofitable orchard from her uncle. For reasons which will emerge as the story unfolds, he was the family’s black sheep.

Both stories have as their motive force the sort of existential crisis that tends to grip people towards the end of their career. Life choices get re-evaluated; sometimes, crazy decisions get made.

Research vacation

So of course, my wife and I went to Tasmania.

It was a month-long vacation in our little Toyota Hiace campervan, combined with research. The research objects were an unlikely combination on the face of it: crayboats and cider apples.

Many of our trips since I started writing fiction have had a research element. It’s fun!

Instead of your itinerary being determined by a gushy guidebook, well-meant but one-eyed personal recommendations (‘You really must see … ’) or general curiosity, it’s mapped to places and events that might turn out relevant to the sketchy story in your head.

Serendipity strikes

Then — pow! zap! — serendipity strikes.

You go for a wander round a quiet harbour while your spouse explores the secondhand bookshop. You spot an interesting-looking boat. Ooh! That looks rather like a crayboat, but with a full sailing rig. Let’s take a closer look. Here’s a little sign in the rigging — with a potted history of the boat and the phone number of the owner. You drop him a text message and within an hour you’ve arranged with the owner’s brother to take a look over the boat. It becomes a model for the one in your story.

Now things start to get weird. The brother has the same first name as the protagonist of your other story. And he’s a leading apple grower, or was before he retired. What the … ?!

It starts to dawn on you: all the ways — the complex and surprising ways — that your seemingly random subjects, apples and crayboats, are connected.

Momentum builds. By breakfast time the next day, you have the personal number of the leading cider maker in Tasmania. You suppress your impostor syndrome and give him a call. You make a date for later in the month.

He’s as good as his word. On the appointed day, he takes you for a whirlwind tour of his orchards, taking two hours out of his busy working day, right in the middle of co-ordinating picking crews — it’s autumn and the apple harvest is in full swing.

Weft and warp

And so on and so forth. You meet another cider maker and orchardist. She takes time out to show you what an old, neglected orchard would look like — the sort you need for your story. What happens to apple trees when they’re not tended and pruned.

You stay in a beach house on the most astonishingly beautiful beach. In days and nights filled with the crashing surf, you dream a childhood for your protagonist there — in an imaginary fishing community. Two months later, you will discover by chance that the fishing village once existed.

You get to sail on a 70-year-old crayboat. The stand-in helmsman has renovated his own crayboat, promises to send you details. He’s as good as his word, too. You take a tour of the Wooden Boat School in Franklin, where students learn the boatbuilding skills your protagonist is going to need. You buy more obscure books about Huon pine — the remarkable timber from which ‘your’ boat is built. You stay on a property which with just a little imagination resembles the Last Orchard, albeit sans apple trees. 

The dense weft and warp of right times, right people, right places starts to tighten into a fabric which will form the backdrop to your story.

You drink a lot of cider. For research purposes.

You sit outside a cottage in the Huon Valley as the mist forms thick as cotton wool over the inky river, and the logging trucks rumble by, changing down through their gears to climb the hill behind you.

It starts to feel real. Like your characters exist, and the things you imagine really happened.

From then on, it’s not so much making-shit-up as interrogating the minds of your characters, to find out what they did and why.

So yeah, fiction research and vacations. They go together like crayboats and apples.

Thanks for reading!