As a child I dreamed of a giant machine that could store every personal memory and event that had ever taken place, so that I would never forget anything. I knew it couldn't be a computer because that was the screeching wailing box in my dad's study that took 15 minutes to load up the thrillingly-titled "tennis game". I was thinking more of a database in which all information could be stored and shared. Yes, at the age of four - circa 1980 - I invented the internet - but was too busy planning a trip to the moon to establish the idea.
This story has a point. Which is:
Recently I have been attempting to write a novel that I have decided should take place in a small village in Romania; nowhere else will do. Yet, I've never been to Romania. I also have no disposable income to pay for a trip there, nor a benevolent publisher who might cover the cost of the trip under the guise of "research".
In days gone by, this would have caused a problem. To accurately portray a country as unfamiliar as Romania is to me, I would have had to spend weeks, months even years in libraries digging out facts about population, geography, cultural preferences, history and so forth in order to create a believable backdrop against which to set the story. I might have spoken to people from that country, or those who had visited it; maybe sampled indigenous foods, listened to music - anything to get a better feel for the place.
That process is changing. Nowadays, thanks to the internet and its many search engines writers can conduct their research at a much-accelerated pace. Chief among the millions of web resources is its most frequently-visited encyclopedia, Wikipedia.
Wikipedia means no more hours spent in dimly-lit library backrooms, shoulder deep in dusty books. Research has now been boiled down to a few hours on a laptop at a crumb-flecked table in an overpriced coffee shop.
This may not necessarily be a good thing.
For starters, Wikipedia is an ever-changing and resource reliant on the accuracy of its contributors (who, for all we know, cut and paste their facts from other websites) and the moderators who police the site. It has made for some amusingly false and libellous accounts.
Of course, any writers worth their salt should cross-reference and check their facts, but why believe one anonymously-written internet site over another? Sooner or later you're going to have to drain your coffee cup, brush away the muffin crumbs and check these facts in more reliable resources. Like, books. In libraries and that.
The other problem is, research only presents the cold facts. The smell and feel of a place, for example, can never be fully conveyed via the internet. The Wikipedia entry on Romania, for example, contains 6,804 words, the length of a large newspaper article but less than a student dissertation - and certainly way too short to document the entire history and experience of a country.
Yet so far - I'm ashamed to admit - Wikipedia has been my prime source. The days of laborious research to produce credible fiction are disappearing. More and more, writers simpley click a link, skim-read an article, and extract the (questionable) facts.
Clearly there is an argument then that far from keeping us informed and up to date, the internet and sites such as Wikipedia are in fact making writers lazy, unconvincing and inaccurate. I hope I'm not one of them.
