I was mostly playing the "too much research" issue for entertainment value (and I got about 300 words written before I knocked off), but the responses got me thinking.

I don't care about "getting details right." Not really. I couldn't care less if history buffs write to me. But my best writing happens when I understand where I am and know what I'm looking at, smelling, hearing, tasting, feeling. If I hit the bottom of an embankment in a 5000 pounds of steel, not only do I need to feel the impact (which would be where... butt, lower back, chest restraint--did they have those in a '59 Caddy?--possibly chin against steering wheel, palms against steering wheel, right foot probably mashed against brake, left foot braced against floorboard), but I need to see what's in front of me. For me, writing is only partly about the ideas of what's there and the artful placement of those details; it's more about immersion in the scene and writing my way out from the center of it.

I can't immerse if I don't know what's in front of me, what's behind me, what the sounds are, what the smells are. (Does the engine suffocate when gas sloshes away from the fuel intake? On a '59 Caddy, it probably does. Smell: Gasoline. Sound: silence and starter motor. Radio, if it was already on--so did a '59 Caddy have a generator or an alternator? What's on the radio in Arizona in 1959? Was FM in use there yet?)

If I'm not going to treat period details like mere icing, which I don't want to do, then I have to have enough that I experience enough of the character's reality to simply write what happens.

It doesn't mean I use all these details in the text. It also doesn't mean I'm going to waste a lot of time and kill my forward momentum. What it does mean is I can't convince the reader if I'm not convinced, and I won't be convinced until I can look in every direction and know what's there.

All writing is period writing. Modern-period is just easier, because you've already done the research.

But the other necessary thing about research--the thing that means no, I'm not going to just write the scene from my imagination--is that the details you discover are often far more interesting than the details you'd invent. (Or, I suppose, I should say the details I discover are often more interesting than the details I'd invent.) For example, my original idea required a highway, a concrete embankment, and a dirt frontage road down below.

All fine. Nothing wrong with it; it works.

Isn't it more interesting that there's now a two-lane highway, a ravine, and a crumbling access road to a closed gold mine?

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