In 2010 I interviewed the artist Gieve Patel in his studio in Mumbai. It was a bare, spartan room with a balcony open to thick tropical foliage. A few feet behind Patel, a human skull lurked on a trolley arranged with his paints and brushes. He liked having it around, he said, because it reminded him of his medical college days in the sixties. My pulse quickened—the protagonist of my then unpublished novel, Inside the Mirror, was an aspiring artist, unhappily studying medicine at her father’s direction. I questioned him further, and Patel told me something I’d never heard during all my research into art and medicine in mid-century India.
When I returned to the United States, I immediately rewrote the first pages of my novel using what I had learned. Readers now tell me they’re pulled into the opening scene of Inside the Mirror, which was published last year by the University of Nebraska Press, as my protagonist, Jaya, warily removes human bones from a gunny sack and assembles them on the floor to sketch. It’s a scene I couldn’t have invented if Gieve Patel had not recalled that every medical student in his time was given a human skeleton to study at home, a bundle of bones culled from the unclaimed bodies of the poor found in the streets.
The interview is every journalist’s primary investigative tool, and as a longtime freelancer I often use it as an integral part of my research for a fiction project. Nothing injects vitality into a manuscript like information drawn from someone’s lived experience. I always arrive at an interview (over)prepared with a long list of questions pertaining to my story, so my challenge is to recognize the opportunity to set aside my script and pursue the unexpected—like the skull.
Apart from interviews, reporters might consult original documents and records to get to the truth of a matter. Tasked with accuracy, they strive to write stories that are also palpable and immediate, often shot through with the human voice in the form of direct quotes. A fiction writer shares some of the journalist’s aims but probes, examines, invents, and elaborates narratives to create worlds and works of art.
Not all fiction requires research, of course. If a story hews close to the world you know, your insider understanding is sometimes enough. It’s when you venture to inhabit identities and communnities well beyond your experience that speaking to people and visiting places matters. A variety of primary sources can enrich fiction: diaries, journals, autobiographies, and personal blogs; original papers, transcripts, and documents; artifacts; photographs and paintings; recordings; amateur videos such as those found on YouTube; scientific papers and newspaper articles of the time. Books can ground an author in their subject, but nothing sparks the imagination like original materials and experiences laden with emotion and surprise.
Journalistic methods of discovery can benefit any genre, from historical to speculative fiction. Octavia E. Butler, the doyenne of Afrofuturism and the first science fiction writer to win a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship, was a scrupulous world-builder and researcher who monitored rainfall levels and plant growth in her southern California neighborhood for her climate-catastrophe novel Parable of the Sower (Four Walls Eight Windows, 1993), and traveled to the Peruvian jungle to discover a model for the postapocalyptic rainforest in her Xenogenesis trilogy. William Faulkner mined multiple volumes of a plantation diary kept by a close friend’s ancestor for his novels, copying long passages by hand. Scholars now trace many incidents and details in the Nobel laureate’s fictional Yoknapatawpha County to the plantation owner’s records.
Min Jin Lee has spoken of abandoning a dry first draft of her acclaimed epic, Pachinko (Grand Central Publishing, 2017), which she had based solely on archival research, for almost twenty years until her husband’s job took her to Japan. Immersing herself in the Korean Japanese community—her novel’s subject—she discovered her central characters by interviewing people and developed a compelling narrative. Technology offers vicarious connections when direct access to a subject isn’t available. British author Samantha Harvey won the 2024 Booker Prize for Orbital (Grove Press, 2023), a brief, meditative novel on space travel that is based on countless hours she spent viewing live-stream footage from the International Space Station during the COVID lockdown.
I spoke with eight fiction writers, including winners of major literary awards, who are all journalists and whose gift for storytelling is enhanced by their skillful reporting. I wanted to learn about how they investigate their fictional stories and conjure riveting characters and scenes from complex real-world information. The trick for any writer, a few of them told me, is not to confuse the gains of research for story. Research can illuminate and lend credibility to a story, yes, but that story must first arise from fictional characters and their struggles. V. V. Ganeshananthan’s acclaimed second novel, Brotherless Night (Random House, 2023), examines the devastating costs inflicted on one family by a violent Tamil separatist movement that erupted in response to murderous government oppression in 1980s Sri Lanka. Her commitment to her story and patient craftsmanship over eighteen years won Brotherless Night the 2024 Carol Shields Prize for Fiction, one of the richest awards in literature, and the U.K.’s prestigious Women’s Prize for Fiction.
Born in the United States, Ganeshananthan, who began her career as a higher-education reporter at the Atlantic, crafts fiction that reveals a deep emotional connection to her family’s homeland. Moved by a human rights document called The Broken Palmyra, written in real time by Sri Lankan academics who witnessed a brutal phase of the civil war, she fully imagined her teenage female protagonist, Sashi. The complex novel of a shattered society emerged from information Ganeshananthan gathered over the years from a multitude of people.
“A lot of interviews were conducted in the diaspora,” Ganeshananthan says, referring to the Sri Lankan American Tamil community. “Many of the people who lived through that time period have emigrated [to the United States].” Among those she spoke to through networking in her community were former militants and those who had suffered horrific tragedies during the conflict. While journalists are cautioned not to retraumatize subjects, Ganeshananthan found that many of the people she interviewed “really, really wanted to talk, including about terrible traumatic things that had happened to them,” she says. “They had, in some cases, never been asked.”
Ganeshananthan recognized the Sri Lankan immigrant community as a valuable reservoir of knowledge. Often she connected to sources through messaging apps like WhatsApp and Signal; occasionally a translator accompanied her because she isn’t fluent in Tamil. The United States contains a wealth of such diasporas and immigrant groups, communities any writer interested in writing about can contact through their cultural associations, newspapers, local businesses, and other channels. As Min Jin Lee said on an American Masters podcast in 2024, writers must have the freedom to write stories outside their experience, with one caveat: “You need to do the homework. You need to really do the work before you write it.”
Phil Klay, a former Marine, put in much shoe-leather reporting for his National Book Award–winning debut story collection, Redeployment (Penguin Press, 2014), and subsequent novel, Missionaries (Penguin Press, 2020), which consider the human toll of warfare. In 2008, Klay returned home from a tour with the U.S. Marine Corps in Anbar province, Iraq, where he served as a public affairs officer herding journalists. Haunted by “this very fascinating, troubling, confusing world of experiences,” he was left with questions: “What is this thing that I am a part of? What is this war?”
Klay distinguishes between a “thin” and “thick” understanding of subject matter. As a press liaison in Iraq, he had a broad overview of the many moving parts of conflict, but a shallow, or “thin,” understanding of the specifics. When he sat down to write what became the title story of Redeployment, he recognized the inadequacy of his personal experience of war. “I wanted to write about it from the inside, as if I were an artilleryman, as if I were a mortuary officer, as if I were an adjutant or a foreign service officer.” So he dug deeper. “When you interview somebody in real life, it gives you a different relationship to the material, right? You feel a different level or responsibility and a certain emotional charge that changes the way you write.”
While Klay had an insider’s edge in finding Marines to talk to, he advises fiction writers to seek out interview subjects “any way you can, any connection is useful.” Cold e-mailing people is an option, as is reaching out to an academic in your subject area who might provide an introduction. For Missionaries, which delves into paramilitary operations in Colombia, Klay relied on his wife’s Colombian family to help him make connections. “It’s important to me that I do research,” says Klay, “not so that I can faithfully transfer things from the real world into the work, but so that I feel comfortable enough with the material that I can invent.”
The collision of two worlds—coconut farming in India and the ascent of AI in America—supercharge Vauhini Vara’s dystopian debut novel, The Immortal King Rao (Norton, 2022), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize set in both Vara’s ancestral home of Andhra Pradesh, India, and the tech hub of Seattle. As a former technology reporter for the Wall Street Journal and contributor to prominent national magazines, Vara had access to tech CEOs—including Sam Altman, head of OpenAI—whom she interviewed for articles while deftly slipping in questions related to her fictional side hustle. For the India sections, Vara spoke to family members for their recollections of village life in the past. Google searches and human connections led her to experts in caste politics and the coconut industry.
For writers interested in exploring big tech or big business in fiction, Vara suggests contacting employees in middle management who are knowledgeable about their industry and more likely to be open to off-the-record conversations. While journalists must avoid conflicts of interest, fiction writers are free to find connections through friends and family members. To expand your network as you interview, she recommends asking the person you’re speaking to, “Who else should I be talking to?” She always does.
To create richer scenes in fiction, Vara advises writers to deepen the conversation with questions of context as a journalist writing a feature does. Of someone recalling past events, Vara might inquire: “What were people wearing back then?” or “What was the broader political context in which these things were happening?”
Debut author Alisa Alering began writing Smothermoss (Tin House, 2024), their surrealist Gothic tale of two sisters in Appalachia, about seven years ago, at the same time the writer started a reporting job at Science Node magazine (since shuttered). Journalistic deadlines quickly taught Alering the discipline to dispense with their tendency for ornamental writing and obsessively perfecting paragraphs in all their creative writing as well. Alering was also astonished to discover what a fertile arena science presented for fiction. An inspiring conversation with a computational biologist sowed the seeds for a future novel, which Alering anticipates will take a great deal more research before they can begin drafting.
In this era of environmental crisis and warp-speed technological change, Alering suggests writers interested in scientific discoveries consult websites like ScienceDaily and EurekAlert!, which report on the latest scientific papers across fields. Research scientists are credited on the papers and their contact information can be searched online. Many scientists are affiliated with universities, and most are passionate about their work. If the lead researcher won’t speak to you, Alering advises you work your way down the pecking order. Even a graduate research assistant can tell you a great deal. Speaking to an actual scientist, Alering says, “will remind you to think about your topic through a human lens, instead of an intellectual one.”
To build trust with strangers, Miles Harvey instructs his creative writing students at DePaul University on gathering oral histories through the art of “deep interviewing.” This involves repeated meetings with a subject to learn about their life and community. (Harvey edited a student anthology of the oral histories of Chicago gang members in 2013.) The author of several nonfiction books, one of which is about a con man, and a recent short story collection, The Registry of Forgotten Objects (Mad Creek Books, 2024), which continues his fascination with deception and illusion, Harvey believes the methods of oral history can be useful to fiction writers who seek to understand a particular environment and people. “Creative writing programs often fail their students by not giving them basic research and interview skills,” Harvey says. “I try to make sure that doesn’t happen in my own workshops.”
Ganeshananthan also told me of repeatedly going back to certain sources over the years as she composed Brotherless Night, particularly those who possessed sensitive information and did not easily trust a writer. She likened it to a beat reporter’s strategy of regularly calling their key contacts, say, the president of the city council. I find checking in occasionally with contacts over a yearslong novel project helps maintain a core group I can rely on as new questions come up.
While some writers limit research before they begin drafting a novel—filling in the blanks as they go along—Harvey enjoys plunging in. “Rabbit holes are where I live, the deeper the better,” he says with delight. Searching through old newspapers led him to some of his short stories. Newspaper databases like LexisNexis are especially useful to him. “I love the way newspaper stories place something not only in space but in time…. I’d look up a story about a con man I was writing about and see all the other stories on that page and get a real sense of the time.”
From left: Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan, Rebecca Johns, and Maura Cheeks. (Credit: Johns: Kelly Dougherty; Cheeks: Adélaïde Chantilly)
On the other end of the spectrum, reporting from life is a practice well known to Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan. Her debut novel, Sarong Party Girls (William Morrow, 2016), a dissection of sexual politics in Singapore, emerged from nights out clubbing with friends in her home city. Prohibited from entering elite gentlemen’s clubs, Tan, a New York City–based veteran of the Baltimore Sun and the Wall Street Journal, tenaciously debriefed male acquaintances about what happens behind closed doors. The result is a stunning and nuanced fictional scene of female degradation. It’s also a testament to the power of a writer listening intently to another person’s experience.
Now the inaugural George R. R. Martin Chair in Storytelling at Northwestern University, Tan retains the journalistic habit of “gathering string”—collecting details that might serve a future story. Anything that strikes her interest is memorialized: overheard conversations jotted down, umpteen photos and videos shot of passing sights. Visual cues can instantly provoke memories and emotions. “This kind of daily reporting,” Tan says, “helps me when I’m writing fiction to make the scenes come alive a bit more.”
Rebecca Johns, director of the writing and publishing program at DePaul University and a former reporter with small-city newspapers, brings a journalist’s pragmatic approach to historical research: targeted and economical. For her the publisher’s deadlines are always appreciated. “If I have unlimited time, I will take unlimited time,” she admits.
When early readers of her debut novel, Icebergs (Bloomsbury, 2006), a family saga, pointed to problems in the opening scene of a plane crash in the frozen wasteland of northern Canada, Johns realized she needed better information. Her grandfather’s tale of his World War II experience and a few newspaper clippings didn’t suffice as research. “Creative Googling” led her to a group of B-24 Liberator history buffs who took her on a ride in a restored plane, giving her a clear understanding of the bomber her grandfather flew. Another group, connected to the Royal Canadian Air Force, miraculously put her in touch with the copilot who had saved her grandfather’s life. A local reference librarian in Gander, Newfoundland, sent Johns a trove of scanned newspaper articles and personally showed her around the area when she visited. Filled with new knowledge, Johns dreamed up a spectacular fictional crash much worse than the real one.
Research librarians and archivists are invaluable resources, as are small museums and historical societies devoted to specific subject areas. Some have tucked-away libraries containing rare scrapbooks of original material. Ask if they do. Archivists figured large in the writing of Acts of Forgiveness (Ballantine Books, 2024), Maura Cheeks’s debut novel about a future America in which Black citizens are offered reparation payments. Building upon a 2019 article she wrote for the Atlantic, Cheeks wrote three drafts based on streamlined academic research and interviews with experts on her subject matter. But she got stuck when her protagonist, Willie Revel, must prove she is descended from slaves to qualify for payments. The nuts and bolts of genealogical research through slaveholder records was a mystery to Cheeks, so she traveled to two archives in Mississippi, just as Willie does.
“They were pulling out documents and walking me through [the research] as if I was Willie,” Cheeks recalls of the warm, helpful archive employees. Never had she had such heartfelt conversations about race and slavery as she had with the archivists in the Deep South. “It was a very spiritual journey,” Cheeks says. Her real-life experience carries into her novel when Willie participates in a church ritual with archive employees and “felt a part of her spirit lift, freed.” The author, who is also the owner of Liz’s Book Bar in Brooklyn, New York, advocates drafting a novel first and investigating all the questions that come up afterward. But it was in her ultimate encounter with people, not books, that Cheeks discovered the most profound moments in her story.
Endless research can be an occupational hazard. Johns taught a summer historical fiction workshop where only one writer out of ten brought pages for critique—the other nine had spent years absorbed in research. One woman had spent a decade. “I feel like I have to know everything before I can start,” Johns recalls her saying.
On the flip side are writers who consider their imagination a superpower that allows them to take on any identity they please—call it the Lionel Shriver perspective. (“I am hopeful the concept of ‘cultural appropriation’ is a passing fad,” Shriver said in 2016.)
“Writers sometimes feel too confident in their ability to imagine what it’s like to be someone else,” Vara tells me. “If you’re going to try to write outside of your experience, there’s an obligation to do research of some kind, because people read fiction with somewhat of an expectation that they’re learning something about the world we actually exist in. So if you’re writing a novel set in—I don’t know—Nova Scotia, and you’ve never been to Nova Scotia, that’s fine, but it feels to me like you need to do some work to figure out what life in Nova Scotia is like.”
Once you figure it out, you can invent. From truth emerges the fictional dream.
Parul Kapur’s debut novel, Inside the Mirror (University of Nebraska Press, 2024), winner of the AWP Prize for the Novel, was longlisted for the Center for Fiction’s 2024 First Novel Prize and the 2024 New American Voices Award. As a journalist and critic, she has written for the New Yorker, the Wall Street Journal Europe, Newsday, Esquire, GQ, and the Paris Review.
Thumbnail credit: Leah Roth