T.Coraghessan Boyle, On Research and Historical Fiction

00:08 [T.Coraghessan Boyle] Right now I'm working on a very long, complex historical novel, so when you just saw me dashing to look at things, I had to mention some film stars and some films of 1916. Well, I was just a kid back in 1916. I barely remember what the movies were, you know? So I had to look in the encyclopedia. Sure, what you're doing in

00:30 producing a finished work is seducing an audience into your point of view. You want them to believe it's totally credible, and in my historical novels I try to make it as true as possible. But the fun for me, for instance, in The Road to Wellville, is to draw a fine line between what is pure invention, where I'm just sitting here improvising, as you say, going and tapping the unconscious and going on, and what is real historical fact. And in Wellville,

01:00 the most absurd stuff is the true stuff, the real stuff that really happened. And to separate that from what I invent is probably something no one could do, except me, because I'm the one who knows what's true and what's not. But that's the fun of doing a historical novel for me. But again, many of my short stories and my shorter contemporary novels deal with current things, current issues. Like The Tortilla Curtain, for instance, we're dealing with

01:30 illegal immigration. That's a different sort of research and a different sort of texts that you need to read.

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01:39 I use the library resources as much as possible, and you know, librarians are pretty friendly, for the most part. You can say, "I need a map of Argentina in detail," and within a minute, the reference librarian will have it there for you. They're pretty amenable people. I get just what I need

02:00 to get myself going. You can see all the texts sitting around us. You can't see it from this camera angle but this room is full of library books. They're all over the place.  I take these out of USC sometimes for years while I'm working on a given project. I need to know everything about the period in America of 1900 to 1930 right now, not simply what people wore and ate, but what the current events were, what was going on, what people talked like, which of course you can get from reading novels of the period.

02:30 But yes, of course. Even if you're doing a fairly simple story but it's on a subject, you need to know about the subject.