Caution, Novelists: Other Writers at Work

Why reading and research are necessary but they're never sufficient and sometimes counter-productive.

Have you ever mentioned the setting in time or place of your fiction-in-progress, and had someone urge you to read a particular book set in the same place or period? Or to watch a particular film, TV series or documentary?

Would you immediately drop by the library or drop onto the sofa? Or would you make a note to give that book or programme a wide berth till your work is no longer in progress, but either finished or abandoned?

I’m mostly drawing my examples from historical fiction because that’s my field, but it applies equally well to writing just about any setting that you can’t or don’t know directly, and which therefore requires a lot of researching and a lot of imagining.

Fiction with the same setting as yours is the most obviously problematic, but this whole Itch post is inspired by this post on Dr. Barbara’s substack.