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Researching the Story—Or Down The Rabbit Hole

“In another moment down went Alice after it, never once considering how in the world she was to get out again. The rabbit-hole went straight on like a tunnel for some way, and then dipped suddenly down, so suddenly that Alice had not a moment to think about stopping herself before she found herself falling down a very deep well.”

—Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

The theme for Xchyler Publishing’s steampunk anthology competition was “Around the World in 80 Days.” Coming from a background in the software field, I immediately seized upon the idea of data moving around the world rather than the main characters.

That turned out to be the only part of my original story concept that actually made it into “Dots, Dashes, and Deceit.”

I’d planned something completely different, involving some weird technology for handling data transmission across the oceans. I recognized that I knew very little about about telegraphy in the real world in that era, and needed to do some quick research to figure out how to marry my own ideas into the real-world technology.

Why bother? After all, this is steampunk, right? You make your own rules! But for me, a big part of the fun is grounding the fantasy in reality, so that you can’t really tell where one ends and the other begins. It gives the fantastic elements some heft, and makes it easier for a reader to suspend their disbelief.

So I began what I thought would be some quick research. A couple hours, I thought, no more. After all, I knew the basics. I just needed to understand how the telegraph system of 1880 worked in the United States.

Like Alice chasing the rabbit, I had no idea just how far my quick excursion would take me.

What I discovered was that the real technology of that era was more advanced than what I’d envisioned in my story. The first transatlantic telegraph cable between North America and Europe was completed in 1858. It didn’t function very long, but more companies laid several more cables over the next few years. By 1880, communication across the Atlantic Ocean was expensive, but speedy and commonplace.

Commercial fax machines were used in the 1860s, renting time on the telegraph cables—a decade before the invention of the telephone.

I bought and read the book, The Victorian Internet, by Tom Standage. So much for a quick excursion on Google! The book is written for the technology layman, and details the worldwide expansion of the telegraph. Throughout the book, the author draws parallels with the modern telecommunications industry.

I was fascinated. So much of what I assumed to be uniquely modern issues in the Internet age had their genesis more than a hundred years earlier. Wire fraud? Online romances? Encrypted secrets? Hackers? Complaints about latency (lag)? They were all there by the late 19th century.

By this point, I’d dedicated many hours into research, and the only practical result was that it had utterly destroyed my original story concept. I’d fallen through the rabbit hole and didn’t know where I’d land. But I was so fascinated by the subject matter that I didn’t want to stop. Besides, all of these discoveries were rich sources of story ideas.

What I was missing at this point was an idea of how all this great technology looked from the trenches. What was the average day in the life of a telegraph operator like?

For the answer to this question, I discovered a delightful romance novel written in 1879 entitled Wired Love – A Romance of Dots and Dashes by Ella Cheever Thayer. Thayer had been a telegraph operator at one time, and drew upon her experiences to write this novel, which went on to become a best-seller for several years. It is a delightful story about a young woman working as a telegraph operator in a small town. Her conversations with a new telegraph operator in another town down the line sparks into something of an online romance.

In the novel, they flirt “online”—much to the annoyance of at least one of the other operators along the line, as everyone on the line can hear what is being “said.” There is a question of the real gender of the person on the other line. There’s an attempt at what would be considered identity theft today. When the protagonist finally meets the real man on the other side of their online relationship, she finds it more comfortable to “text” him (via Morse code) than to talk face-to-face.

It was a fun book to read, even 125 years later. It gave me that grounding in the life of a telegraph operator of the era.

Out of all of this reading and research, a couple of character ideas emerged: Winnie, a telegraph operator, and Joshua, a mute savant who can communicate by Morse code. I fictionally tweaked the technology in a relatively minor way (by steampunk standards, anyway), so that machines have started replacing human telegraph operators. They can transmit and receive messages far faster than a normal human. This renders Winnie’s skills obsolete.

But Joshua, an unusual young man, can interpret the high-speed Morse code unaided. While ‘eavesdropping’ at the telegraph station, he’s discovered a dangerous secret.

So how much of all this research found its way into Dots, Dashes, and Deceit? Very little.

It was tempting to launch into lengthy paragraphs of exposition so I could share all this fascinating information that I’d learned. Instead, it merely informed my writing. While telegraphy is central to the story, that trivia about how a telegraph operator works, their jargon, the technology, and information on how the industry worked (with my fictional alterations) is buried deep into the background. It rarely surfaces at all except by way of some assumptions that I’ve made and, I hope, a consistency that rings true to the reader.

But even though the many hours of research and reading may be invisible to readers, “Dots, Dashes, and Deceit”could not have existed without it. That’s how research works sometimes. But hey, at least I get to talk about all the cool stuff I learned here on the blog!

Software engineer, video game developer, and father, Jay Barnson is a transplant to the state of Utah from the east coast. He grew up on a diet of science fiction and fantasy ranging from Howard, Heinlein, and Tokien to Lucas and Spielberg. His wife and daughters had to drag him to his first steampunk convention. And now they can’t drag him away from the genre.

Barnson’s short story, “Dots, Dashes and Deceit,” is included in Terra Mechanica: a Steampunk Anthologyslated for released May 31, 2014.

Follow Barnson on the web:

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The genesis of Ganesh

The short story “Ganesh,” which Xchyler will publish at the end of this month in the anthology Terra Mechanica, was a delicious opportunity for me to revisit the world I inhabited while writing my debut novel, A Midsummer Night’s Steampunk (AMNS).

Every decent author will tell you that they know way more about their characters, settings, and events than they could possibly fit into the novel. And nowhere is this truer than in the closely related speculative fiction genres of fantasy, Steampunk, and science fiction. AMNS is certainly no exception.

As a SpecFic writer, I fill my notebooks with thousands of bits of information about how the characters got to be who they are, their relationships to each other, the world they inhabit, and the twists and turns of their adventures. Over months and sometimes even years, they emerge from the shadows of one-dimensional concepts and become very real to me. They become people. I dream about them at night. They become my friends and enemies. I fall in love with them, I weep over them, I despise them, and I yearn for their redemption.

To make things worse, I’m a lover of history and a bit of a perfectionist, so the process of ‘world creation’ tends to take on a life of its own. I go through all the stuff I know, and decide what bits serve the story, and what is distraction, what is vital info for the reader, and what is a sidetrack leading to nowhere. In the case of AMNS, following/steampunking as I did the skeleton of Shakespeare’s classic A Midsummer Night’s Dream, events are compressed into a couple of days and nights. So even though I could go on and on for thousands upon thousands of words with the stuff I know, most of it wouldn’t serve the story.

I didn’t realize it at the time of the first draft of “Ganesh,” but I didn’t write the short story to stand on its own. As a tyro novelist I figured I knew, loved, and cared about this character, and implicitly assumed that anyone else picking up the short story would too. Um . . . wrong. Especially my editor, the redoubtable Penny Freeman. After all, who (besides me) knows and loves this character better than she? Who else would just go along with me, and dive headlong into the story? Um . . . wrong.

Because therein lies the difference between a writer (me), a reader (you), and an editor (in this case, Penny). The writer speaks for the characters of his creation. He speaks for his world. He speaks to a reader, someone for whom he hopes he can draw back the curtain and say, “TA DA! Come into my world and let me tell you a story!”

Enter the editor. While the writer waxes rhapsodic over the tsunamic output of his imagination, the good editor stands proxy for the reader. She is the guardian of perspective.

So Penny turned down the first draft of “Ganesh.” Flat. For the first twenty minutes I was crushed. Then, with her comments in hand, I went back to the story with fresh perspective. O…M…G.! She was right! I was asking the reader to start the story already caring. I had started the story at a point in the narrative arc that absolutely required it.

If I myself, unfamiliar with the AMNS world, had come upon that first draft in an anthology I’d have read the first page or two, dismissed it as maudlin, and would have been quickly on to the next story without a backward glance. (After all, isn’t that what we love about anthologies?)

The same wasn’t true of my good, intelligent, educated pre-readers. They loved it. Because they already loved it. To them it was another chapter of AMNS, a flashback that told them more about a beloved character. Just like it was to me. Lesson: learned. Admiration for good editorial skills: relearned.

Because I really care about “Ganesh,” I went back and rewrote it. Then I rewrote it again. I changed the plot arc. And rewrote it yet again. Same people, same world, same events, same emotional punches in the gut. But something still wasn’t right. I set it aside, worked on other projects, went back to it, wrote a whole different version, aimed at a different audience. Set it aside again.

So when Penny came back with an inquiry about the story, whether I was willing to undertake a pretty serious editorial effort, I was more than ready. I believed in the story. I knew I needed the help.

Together we burned through two more drafts in just a few days. We reset the narrative point, leaving its tie-in to AMNS but not requiring the upfront emotional investment. The fever was upon me. Or labor pains. Or something. The result is what you will see at the end of the month when it is finally published. Thank goodness.

I will leave it to you, the reader, to decide if the labor produced a Miranda or a Caliban. Either way, I hope you enjoy your visit to my world.

Read Tarbet’s short story “Tombstone” in Shades and Shadows: a Paranormal Anthology (2013) and A Midsummer Night’s Steampunk (2013). His short story, “Ganesh” will appear in Terra Mechanica: a Steampunk Anthology in May 2014.

Tarbet works and lives with his wife in Salt Lake City, where he spends his summers smoking hundreds of pounds of meat for his catering business, and his winters singing opera with the Utah Symphony and Opera.

Follow Tarbet on Twitter @SETarbet and on the web at ScottTarbet.timp.net.

BY CANDACE J. THOMAS

Tell us a bit about yourself! Give us your background in 30 seconds. How did you get started writing?

I’ve had a mind for exciting other worlds for a long time now, and I think I’ve been wanting to tell good stories for as long as I’ve been sucked into reading those of others.

In terms of my own background, I’ve been a man of many trades for some years now, who spent a long time finding out I could do a bit more with this writing thing at university with some very cool people. In that group, I found the confidence to finish a story. I’ve kind of gone from there, really.

Primal Storm is your second publication with Xchyler. Tell us about the process you went through. What were the differences between this time and the first time, with Oblivion Storm?

I probably mentioned at the launch party, for those who were paying attention to such things, that the key difference was the speed at which it all happened. Everything with Book 2 seemed to move a lot faster for some reason.

Penny cited a huge difference between editing Primal Storm and Oblivion Storm. With Book 1, the challenge was turning a manuscript twice the size into the leaner copy that finally hit the shelves. She mentioned a concern some way through that the Primal Stormword count that it might have ended up too short, if anything.

The first draft of what ended up being Oblivion Stormstarted about seven years before the last proofing run occurred. I had about a seventh of the time for Book Two—not knowing, at the time, there would definitely be a second book! Now I know there’s going to be a third—who knows what the difference in process will be between that and the first two!

Tell us a bit about Oblivion Storm and Primal Storm: where did your inspiration come from?

Some of the characters just hung around from an old university project of mine. The stories kind of grew around them, to a certain extent. I had certain motifs from the very beginning with Oblivion Storm.

Like many writers who know London, the iconic Underground had an big influence on an idea I wanted to run with. Weirdly, that little warm breeze you get when a train is about to arrive at your platform started this whole thing! That, and a certain news article about an amnesiac who happened also to be a talented piano player. There’s a bit more about that on an interview I had with my old university.

As for Primal Storm, well, the main line behind the story came as pretty logical from Book 1. However, the added ‘beef’, in terms of a bit of a sub-theme behind it, came from a good afternoon’s action movie session.

A bit of poking led me to this talk from Sebastien Foucan, and, where the Underground sub-themed the first book, for Primal Storm, it was very much the art that is parkour. I absolutely had to use one of his quotes at the start of the book, so central it became to Jennifer’s story.

Who are a few of your favorite authors? Do you think they inspired your writing style? How so?

Citing some of the names I always mention, Ursula LeGuin got me started on all of it. The interest in fantasy, the writing. It shames me that I can’t remember the name of the teacher who started reading The Wizard of Earthsea to us in class, but I will thank her forever for the introduction. Seriously, this was long before Harry Potter, but a thing of beauty.

I also really enjoy Jim Butcher and his Dresden Fileswork. Always gripping to follow. And what is there to say about Neil Gaiman that hasn’t been already? Neverwhereis one of those Underground-inspired works I was telling you about, and surely one of the best. Good Omens, his collaboration with Terry Pratchett, is just amazing.

And I’ve just started on the Rivers of London series, by Ben Aaronovitch. Peter Grant is rapidly going to become one of my favourite characters anywhere, I suspect.

What is some advice you’d give to someone hoping to get published?

I’ll quote this verbatim from the launch party. Three words: Go. For. It. You have to get this idea out somewhere, or at the very least, try. I did that for a few years, and eventually found a good home with some wonderful people. It’s like a family here, and even your most crazy ideas get the correct guidance. In my case, often a, ‘yes! Do that!’ For which I am incredibly grateful.

But the advice is always, and I’ve taken this from more experienced authors than me, is first get writing. If you’re patient and persistent enough, the rest will follow.

When he’s not LARPing or making personal appearances, R. A. Smith writes from his home in Manchester, England, where he lives with his girlfriend and cat. Russell’s latest book, Primal Storm, Book 2 of The Grenshall Manor Chronicles, was released in January, 2014.

Follow Russell on his blog, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon and Goodreads.

Shauntel Simper lives in Arizona with her two pet turtles and various insane roommates, and her hobbies include singing, comic book reading, and pretending she can dance. After a strong tenure as an intern, Shauntel was promoted to editorial assistant here at The X. Her energy, dependability, solid education, and an eagerness to learn make her an excellent addition to the team. Her next project, Reflected, Book 2 of the Vanguard Legacy series, will be released in March, 2014.