Guest Post - J Bennett : Researching

Please welcome J Bennett to Books for Company!

I hope you find this guest post as interesting as me.

Huge thank you J Bennett! - Such an interesting post and shows so much passion to spend so much time researching. 

The Perils of Internet Research 

By J Bennett

Thank you Jodie for hosting me and for supporting so many talented authors. As a passionate reader, I’ve always been interested in how authors compile their research. I assumed that it must be hard to write a main character who is a lawyer, a doctor, or a police detective if you’ve never been those things. I got to find out for myself when I started drafting my debut novel, Falling, featuring two vigilante angel hunters…

I don’t think it’s even considered paranoid anymore to assume everything you do online is being tracked, sifted and compiled. I wonder what my profile looks like to the guys on the other end of the search engines, or the ad companies that drop little cookies to follow my trail across the Internet.

Most of it is probably banal, but I must have earned at least a few flags by now. Most likely from some of the following terms I’ve put into the search engines:

“How to live off the grid”

“How to knock someone unconscious with a single punch”

“How to obtain unregistered guns”

Before you go assuming that I’m one of those people living in the hills, stocking up on weapons for the coming apocalypse and learning how to start a fire by rubbing two sticks together, I swear that I’m only doing research for a book. 

My debut novel, Falling – Girl with Broken Wings – features Maya, a college sophomore, who is kidnapped and halfway changed into an “Angel”. In the world of Falling an angel is not a good thing. In fact, it’s a very bad thing, most notably because angels have ferocious appetites and happen to feed off the auras of living creatures.

As you can imagine, Maya isn’t too thrilled with the new state of her affairs. Luckily, she isn’t a full angel. She was rescued halfway through the change by two half-brothers she never knew she had. Imagine the happy family reunion when her brothers realize that she is changing into the very thing that they have spent their whole lives hunting and killing.

Major fireworks entail.

But back to inappropriate Internet searches.  Maya’s brothers are vigilante angel hunters. They live mostly off the grid, slipping through the shadows of society, lying about their identities and engaging in much illegal activity as they try to avenge the deaths of their parents and stop full angels from feeding on innocent humans.

While developing the story for the book, I realized that I needed a lot more information on the vigilante lifestyle. After all, I don’t remember getting to talk to any vigilantes at my high school career fair, nor did my mostly standard middleclass upbringing ever give me much insight into criminal activity beyond jaywalking and maybe a tinsey bit of underage drinking.  

I had a lot of questions. How do vigilantes make money without a bank account number? Where do they learn how to fight? How do they get unregistered weapons and how can they find the bad guys when the bad guys don’t want to be found?

The most important question of all: How was I supposed to find this stuff out?

Ah yes, the Internet. Here is a good place to mention that the Internet is not the be all and end all of research. I didn’t just use the Internet for my research, and I would strongly encourage all writers to do outside research. Nothing can compare to actually traveling through the locations in your book if they exist, interviewing people who do the jobs your characters do, or walking in the shoes of a character – visiting bars and clubs and gun ranges if these are the places they hang out.

Unfortunately, we can’t all do these things, and some information is harder to obtain than others. That’s where the Internet comes in real handy.

So I put in the somewhat inappropriate search terms I mentioned above along with many others. How did the fare? The Internet overflowth with search results. Did you know that there are dozens of websites that explain how to hotwire a car in detail? It amused me greatly that these websites, without fail, always contained very clear disclaimers stating that they don’t condone illegal activity.

Pretty much anything you want to know about living off the grid is, ironically, available on the Internet. There are detailed instructions, essays, blogs and videos. If the apocalypse ever does come upon us, I think we’ll all be okay as long as the Internet remains intact. Nothing like learning how to start a fire with two sticks from a YouTube video.

Speaking of YouTube, if you want to learn about self-defense fighting moves, block out several afternoons on your calendar, buy a jumbo bucket of popcorn and allow YouTube to enlighten you. You’ll find detailed videos on everything from takedowns to chokeholds to other stuff you definitely don’t want to be on the other end of.

Bit by bit, the Internet helped me fill in the missing pieces of research when I couldn’t find direct sources, so that my two vigilantes and their half-angel sister could realistically pursue their mission stocked up on illegal weapons, cash, food and a clean getaway car.

So, if any government agents come knocking on my door, could you all back me up about those Internet searches being book research? I’d appreciate it.

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Learn more and read a free sample at www.GirlWithBrokenWings.com. J Bennett is a professional copywriter and copyeditor.