Anne Rice on Research and the Novel

00:08 [Anne Rice] Research for me is fun. I enjoy reading. I enjoy discovering unusual things. I love reading about unusual places, but I also go to those places. I like to write about them after I've been there. I've been, for example, to the Holy Land twice. And that was very important research for me, just standing on the shore

00:30 of the Sea of Galilee and putting my hands in the water and looking at the mountains that surround the Sea of Galilee. That was extremely important research; that was invaluable. But I also like to read and read and read, and research inspires. Some little fact will inspire me, I'll see a whole story spring to life because some little incident, say in a history by Josephus or Philo of Alexandria. I'll write in the margin, "A whole novel here,

01:00 a whole story." And I'll underline. So to me, research has always been like eating ice cream and chocolate. It's great fun. And I have indeed gone to a morgue and looked at a dead body as a part of research. I did that, and I asked a policeman to take me in New Orleans and actually paid him sort of a consultant fee and he took me in the city morgue and showed me a body there, and I forced myself to look at that body—it was a very painful experience—and that was a part of my research

01:30 because I felt I needed that. And I used that then in a series of books called The Witching Hour books. I described the morgue and I described what the whole experience was like. But the main thing about research is this: it's never really work for me, it's inspiration.

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01:46 I really love doing research, but I don't think [pause]—I think it varies. I think it varies from writer to writer. I was at a writers' workshop once where a woman was working on a novel about her ancestors

02:00 in Russia, and the people in the workshop actually told her that novels weren't written from research, and that she was doing the wrong thing researching her ancestors and their village in Russia. And I remember sitting there being outraged because I thought, how dare they tell this writer this! I mean, obviously she's being inspired by what she's discovering in her research. There's so many ways to research, there's so many ways to write, it's outrageous when any one writer tells another writer

02:30 that that's not the way to go about it. I had a sophomore English teacher in college tell me that I wasn't a real writer because I didn't write with a pencil, I wrote on a typewriter. She said that's all well for a journalist but not for real writers. How dare somebody make a statement like that! I do all my writing on keyboards. I mean, they have to be fast keyboards, fast typewriters, fast computers, and yet there was that person telling me, in essence, you're not a writer. And she did give me

03:00 a B in the class because she said that my sentences were too long.