In an article for Writer’s Digest, writer and filmmaker John Sayles discusses the interplay between writing and research. “Almost all my novels have required a certain amount of research, even the ones set in the present or very recent past,” he writes. “One thing leads to another, you realize you’ve misunderstood history you thought you knew, you get new ideas that can lead you off into undiscovered territory—Which is very seductive.”
Research can be a time suck. Sayles’ personal rule is that he can spend one week looking for information on a chapter or sequence, and then he has to write, even if he has to leave some details for later. “Sometimes you’ll write stuff that you later learn makes no historical sense, but I think it’s more important to keep your forward motion going,” he says.
For his new book, To Save the Man, Sayles read books written by students and faculty of the Carlisle School setting, as well as school publications; read histories of various local tribes; looked at photographs; reviewed insurance maps of Carlisle, PA from 1890; and contemporaneous journalism.
“My biggest serendipitous coups were discovering the juicy family background of the Carlisle teacher who edited the school’s newspapers, finding the pro-genocide newspaper articles of L. Frank Baum of Wizard of Oz fame, and stumbling upon the diaries of Father Francis Craft, a loose-cannon of a Catholic priest who proselytized on the Lakota reservations and was stabbed, not fatally, at the Wounded Knee massacre,” Sayles writes. “A chapter heading from the person who found and assembled his diaries reads ‘Was Father Craft Insane?’ This is a man you’ve got to get into the book.”
