Brooke: The Art of Research

If you want to write—your work never ends; it creeps into every aspect of your life. Research becomes an all-absorbing pursuit—everything is research. It is living.
Your job is to notice everything, the ordinary and the unusual, and document it all. Your job is to ask questions.

At the writer’s symposium I recently attended one of the panel members recommended (as a way to get ideas and avoid writers block) to simply always allow your natural curiosity to run its course. He then recounted how once he was giving blood, and had a simple technical question for the nurse, and he ended up having to go through train of people until he ended up in the office of the chief of medicine at some university talking for a good 40 minutes.
I used to think I could just sit down and write. I thought writing came from within. Now I realize a certain amount of collecting must take place before a person can ever create. Research sounds like boring work—but I have found that it is actually most exciting. One question, one train of thought, can lead me to a whole string of possibilities.

For my short piece on “Avatiach” I started with what I thought was a powerful image, and went from there. Alyne had mentioned to me before that the day before her dad left her whole family just sat in the backyard and ate watermelon. She said her mom and dad slept in the same bed until the day he left. She said it was a startlingly “seamless” transition. This image stuck with me, and I wanted to write about it. So…I started my research. This mainly involved interviewing Alyne. She was a good subject…and excellent interviewee. The details she remembered were golden…
The way her dog chewed on the watermelon rinds. The outfit she was wearing at the airport. The way her dad always gave her the “juicy” part of the fruit and he ate the rind or the seed. Exactly how the watermelon was eaten. The layout of her backyard. I just kept asking, and she just kept supplying me with the answers I needed to write convincingly.

Then I did some additional research online. I looked up a little more about watermelon in Israel. I browsed through a few accounts (on blogs) of people who traveled to Israel and bough watermelon from the street vendors. I read about the agricultural industry of Israel and discovered that watermelon is indeed one of their most popular and abundant summer exports.

When I told Alyne I wanted to focus on the watermelon I prefaced it with “I know watermelon probably isn’t THAT big of a deal in Israel…at least not as much as I make it out to be…” and she cut me off and responded with the line I use to open the piece. She said: “NO! it is a HUGE deal in Israel. Israelis eat watermelon.”

She gave me such good raw material; I really struggled to craft it into something meaningful that reflected the wonderful, beautiful, quirky details of reality. I struggled to capture the feeling and the essence of this experience. I still don’t think I got it down…but it was a good exercise in researching thoroughly and then writing.

And so…I am starting the process all over again. I have to turn in a short creative fiction piece this coming Thursday, and I am thinking about writing using my Beulah character. I have this scene in my mind where she finds out that her elderly neighbor woman has passed away. I imagine this neighbor as being fairly old and having no close friends or relatives to take care of the funeral services, and so some sort of state official has to inventory her possessions and take charge of the burial.

The problem is—I know nothing about how this works, so I just started asking questions. I started with the people around me. I asked Alyne. I asked my family home evening group. This may seem like a sketchy or unreliable source, but you’d be surprised at the kinds of great stuff I got just by asking my peers if they knew what happened in a situation like this. One guy in my FHE group recounted the (rather gruesome and disturbing) story of an old woman in his town that lived alone. She was a cat lady, and people didn’t visit her very often. When she passed away the cats in her house were left with no one to feed them. So…(and this is the gross but also interesting part) they ended up eating her body and then starting to eat each other, before anyone even discovered she died.
Others inform me that when something like that happens state officials do come and provide a cheap burial service. They also go through the house and sell off the stuff somehow.

With this limited knowledge I began to try to research online, and it took a long while but I have finally come across some worthwhile sources.
So if you would excuse me, I am off to watch a documentary on Netflix called “A Certain Kind of Death” that explores this very subject—the death and burial process when the deceased has no “next of kin.”

Tune in Thursday for a possible snippet from my creative piece!