Andy Weir's new science fiction thriller, The Martian,
somehow tells a pulse-pounding, page-turning story grounded in
scientific research and information that'll make any reader feel smart
upon finishing. Weir tells us how he did it and offers some advice.
Thanks
to our modern era, facts are incredibly easy to come by. A few web
searches for your subject matter and you have all the information you
could dream of. You don’t have to schlep down to the library anymore or
try to track down a university professor who can answer your more
obscure questions. Between Google and Wikipedia, 99% of the world’s
knowledge is at your fingertips.
So that makes researching a novel easy, right?
No. Not really. As I learned while working on The Martian.
The
first problem you run into is the inherent unreliability of information
on the internet. A lot of it is inaccurate, most of it is slanted, and
some of it is deliberately misleading. Mars’s atmosphere is 0.6% the
pressure of Earth’s. But when I first looked it up, I found a website
that massively approximated that value to “1%”. Doesn’t seem like much,
but I mention that tidbit about twenty times throughout the book. I
eventually found out and corrected it, but it served as a stern warning
to me: Make sure the information comes from a reliable source. And as
any journalist knows, a fact’s not a fact unless you can corroborate it
independently.
But there’s more to research than
just looking up facts. Eventually you have to make subjective calls. If
you’re writing a science fiction novel, there’s probably some
speculative technology in it. You’ll have to decide how to project
existing technology forward in a plausible way. But this is where being a
writer comes in. I decided my characters would get to Mars on a ship
powered by ion engines. Ion engine technology is in its infancy, so I
got to decide how it would progress. I figured a reactor aboard the ship
would provide the necessary energy, and it’s reasonable for the
future-versions of those engines to be magnitudes more powerful than the
current ones. Poof! They have ion engines. Being a writer is fun.
The
next thing to know is when to say when. If you look up every last
detail on your subject, you’ll never finish. I fell in to this trap
while researching the Pathfinder Mars probe. I wanted to know
some details about its construction and the next thing I knew I was
pouring through obscure documents to find the boot sequence for its
operating system. There’s a point at which you have to stop researching
and start making things up. You are a writer, after all. Making stuff up
is your job.
Eventually, while researching, you’ll learn
something you didn’t want to know. Some fact that ruins a plotline you
had in mind. The good news is that sometimes, learning all the facts can
make for a much more interesting story than you originally had in mind.
For
instance: My protagonist is stranded on Mars in a small temporary base
and has to figure out how to survive for years. He has a few potatoes
from his rations, so he decides to farm them inside the base. I figured
he could bring Martian soil inside, then plant potatoes in it. But to do
that, he needed water—and after some research, I learned that the soil
where he was had almost no water in it. This led to a subplot where he
had to manufacture water from materials he had on hand. And that subplot
ended up becoming one of the pivotal points of the book.
This
is a secret I stumbled in to. Research informs the story. At times, it
almost feels like cheating. You do a few Google searches and a little
math and suddenly plot comes out of nowhere. The things that ruin your
ideas end up making you come up with even better ones.
Once
you’ve done all the research, you move on to a much more difficult
task: Informing readers without deluging them with information. You put
hundreds of hours into that research and you’re incredibly proud that
you came up with a story that matches all the known facts. Deep down,
you really want to brag about that. You want the reader to be blown away
by how much you’ve learned. You have to resist that urge. Save the
bragging for when you’re writing an essay like this one—where I can’t
resist telling you that for The Martian, I worked out my Mars
missions’ orbital paths and necessary launch dates. It took me literally
a week of hard work and I had to write my own custom software for it.
But the only thing the reader saw of all that labor was “It took 124
days to get from Earth to Mars”.
That’s the trick.
Identifying what should and should not be the story. To you, it’s all
fascinating. It’s a subject that’s enthralling to you. Otherwise, you
wouldn’t be writing a book about it. But to the reader, it can become
pointless trivia and an exercise in boredom. Make sure you’re looking at
the story from the reader’s point of view. Not just what you would want
to read, but what the layman would want.
The
truth is, research is just as subjective, creative, and difficult as
every other aspect of writing, even though—if you’ve done it right—the
end result should feel simple, inevitable, and indisputable. Your
readers should never know it’s actually the result of complex, sometimes
arbitrary choices and compromises taking place behind the curtain. And
if you’re lucky, they’ll never even pause to think about it at all.
ANDY
WEIR was first hired as a programmer for a national laboratory at age
fifteen and has been working as a software engineer ever since. He is
also a lifelong space nerd and a devoted hobbyist of subjects like
relativistic physics, orbital mechanics, and the history of manned
spaceflight. His first novel, The Martian, was just released by Crown.
sursa: publishersweekly.com