Why Research is Important

It's fiction, but I try to get the details right.

My latest article for CrimeReads:

HOW THE RESEARCH FOR A NEW NOVEL COMPLETELY SHIFTED ONE AUTHOR'S WAY OF THINKING

Allison Brennan needed to get a plot point right. But the research soon changed her perspective on the homelessness crisis.

Photo by Van Mendoza on Unsplash

Research is an important part of the writer’s life — especially for writers like me who haven’t worked in any of my characters professions. My general rule-of-thumb is if a fact is plot critical, I will strive to get that detail right. Such as, if a body is discovered in the woods, I won’t describe it as skeletal unless the environment and time passage would result in a skeleton. Or if the killer uses a poison, I need to at least understand how that poison works, the symptoms, and how quickly it can kill someone.

But research is not just about forensic details — albeit, they are important in crime fiction. Research is also about people and society. Some is subjective — as a mom of five, I have a different life experience than someone who doesn’t have children; I also have a different experience from mothers today or my grandmother’s generation. This is why reading widely and talking to not only friends but strangers helps to create believable characters — I want to understand people and why they do what they do. Real people in the real world help me create realistic people in my fictional world.

Sometimes, I need to do a deep dive into a subject that I think I know about, but barely understand. For The Missing Witness, that was the homeless crisis. 

First, The Missing Witness is crime fiction — LAPD Detective Kara Quinn returns to Los Angeles after being on loan to the FBI for eight months in order to testify against a human trafficker who she’d arrested. But when Chen, the trafficker, is killed on his way to court, Kara not only needs to find out why, but locate a whistleblower who is now in grave danger. 

When I started writing this book, all I knew was the set-up about Kara and Chen. Everything else came organically as I wrote. After Chen was killed, I needed a good reason for his murder. So I thought about what had to happen for him to be successful in his illegal business — he brought in Chinese women and forced them to work in his factory. After talking to a friend of mine who works in local government, I realized he must have bribed people. Inspectors. Politicians. Cops.

Then an idea started to form. I just needed a backbone for the graft and corruption that led to his murder.

To read the rest of the article, go to CrimeReads.

For more information about The Missing Witness, visit my website!