The Reluctant Researcher: How I Ended Up Writing a Historical Novel

Early on as a writer, I must have internalized the phrase “write what you know” and not looked back.

My characters always seem to end up as extensions of me, living in small towns like the one I grew up in, with careers I know well (writer, teacher). They love rainy days and a pint of beer and hate jogging strollers and afternoon appointments. I have drawn from my travels; my experience with love and happiness and grief and loss. My interests, too. Old cars are everywhere in my books. Pets. Characters fixing up houses. I have listened to other people’s stories and observed their behavior, and all of that has made it into my writing. It doesn’t limit you to write what you know if you keep extending what it is that you know.

But there were things I just didn’t know about my newest book, The Top of the World. To write it, I had to confront my research avoidance. Which is how I ended up accidentally writing a historical novel.

There’s a reason I don’t like to do research. I like to see progress, a task that’s concrete. I like to cross my arms and look at the clean garage and admire the transformation once I’d pulled out all the clutter and put things back on shelves. Or stare at the pile of weeds I pulled from the garden before gathering it all up. And the same is true with my writing.

I kept seeing progress, but the book was missing its heart. I hadn’t bonded with it the way I had my other books. I put it aside and wrote a different book entirely, but I couldn’t shake the one I’d abandoned.

I have never been a full-time writer, and I always have sought to make progress every day in a small window of time. To me, progress equals words. Little by little, the book grows into something real, and all of a sudden, characters become fuller, the plot starts to grip. I can tell myself, “Look, you’ve done something today.” It’s tangible.

Research is abstract. Elusive. The thought of spending months reading and studying reminds me of being in grad school again. I want to keep moving, and research, in my warped logic (keep in mind here that I can admit this attitude is ridiculous and wrong), stops the movement. When I read a book that takes place during World War II, for example, I am filled with a sense of overwhelm. The writer couldn’t just let the words gallop the way I need to when I create. They had to check on things: did people wear socks regularly? How did they store food? What were wages like? What was the cost of a home? How did refrigeration work? Write what you know becomes cloudy, and that energy I need for my writing is interrupted by stops and starts.

Of course, my writing hasn’t always been completely research-free. In my first book, A Little Hope, I had a character with a deadly disease: multiple myeloma. What is the prognosis? What do treatments look like? I needed to investigate these things I (blessedly) did not know. And then I had a character with a dry-cleaning business that I needed to sound believable, so…quick research. I had only been to Connecticut, where the book takes place, a few times, so I studied maps to see the landscape, looked at the layouts of some towns and cities. Manageable bites of research. In A Quiet Life, there was a kidnapping, and I knew nothing about police procedures. Three state police officers were renting a house down the street from us, so one day I saw one of them coming out of the house, and I asked him if I could pick his brain. We had a very helpful chat and I got right back to my writing.

When I began to write The Top of the World about a Poconos resort, I had a lot of know on my side. I had grown up not far from the Poconos in Pennsylvania, so I knew the area well. I loved Dirty Dancing. I had gone to several Poconos resorts over the years. All the pieces were in place, and I could begin my research-light writing.

I started to write about a Poconos resort in the present day, in ruins. I was interested in a place that was starting to fall apart. I could see the resort, and I spent time sketching it all out. Little by little, I created my main character as well as employees of Red Maple Inn, and the owner who’d inherited the place from her parents.

I kept writing, I kept seeing progress, but the book was missing its heart. I hadn’t bonded with it the way I had my other books. I put it aside and wrote a different book entirely, but I couldn’t shake the one I’d abandoned. Finally, I talked to my editor, who suggested I tell the story of the resort in its heyday.

Research, which I’d avoided, had given me a better book, a book with more layers and a very different direction from what I’d been writing in the past.

I thought of the 1970s. I started looking at things that happened in the mid-seventies and listening to songs that were popular, The Carpenters, Elton John, Terry Jacks’s “Seasons in the Sun.” I was born in the late seventies, but I took what I remembered from growing up in the 1980s and started transferring a simpler world onto the page. No cell phones, no social media, no internet. It all came back to me. I watched Jaws. I watched old episodes of Mister Rogers Neighborhood, Three’s Company, The Brady Bunch. I read about Vietnam and Watergate and Jimmy Carter’s primary race. Ali and Frazier’s fight. I looked at fashions in old magazines. I read more about the Poconos history and pored over message boards where people who had honeymooned at different resorts talked about favorite activities: horseback riding, candle making, paddle boating. I watched old commercials to transport my way of thinking and looked at menus from the period. I was a different kind of writer now, a writer who researched!

I liked it.

I didn’t stop. I studied Post-Vietnam Syndrome and asked a doctor friend about treatment options for aggressive types of leukemia during the mid-70s. I looked at cars and gave Chip an old Mustang convertible from the 1960s and his friend Vicky a VW Beetle, which I remember my aunt and uncle driving. The book had found its soul. The time period had buttoned up all my previous concerns, and I started to write a dual narrative between a dying brother’s summer in 1974 and his sister’s stay at the same resort the following summer to try to understand his life and her future better.

Research, which I’d avoided, had given me a better book, a book with more layers and a very different direction from what I’d been writing in the past. It made The Top of the World come alive. I vowed to not run from a challenging writing task again. Writing what you know is only limited by what you take the time to know.

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The Top of the World by Ethan Joella is available from Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster.