Lisa
Mannetti is an award-winning author with a passion for haunted houses, dark
fiction, and serious research. She's also a fellow resident of New York's
haunted Hudson Valley region and one of the nicest people you'll ever meet.
Research
as “Spark” to Creativity
by Lisa
Mannetti
To date,
I’ve read at least thirty to forty books and articles about radium, the dial
painters’ tragedy, dentistry, circuses, sideshows, carnivals, freaks, and the
time period, and I admit I haven’t read all of Fiedler’s highly interesting
book yet, and further, that the title alone has really intrigued me. (How often
do we even think about the myths and images of our secret selves—much less that
“freaks” may mirror the fears we have about our identities?) Clearly, here’s a
book that could give any writer enough food for thought to delve deeply into
the schematics of a dozen books or stories or poems. (Not to mention epigraphs
galore for my own little opus.)
But since
I’ve just begun it, I’ll share something that I read early on in Chapter 2 that
startled me: “In any event, not until Victorian times was the housebroken wolf
sentimentalized into ‘man’s best friend.’ Until then, dogs were alternately fed
and kicked by men….”
Before you
whir past Fiedler’s small statement think about it for a second.
It
surprised me because somehow I thought the “dog as man’s best friend” theory
(cliché, postulate—whatever you want to call it) had to have been around for
thousands of years. It’s a phrase we begin hearing in earliest childhood, and
we grow up believing it: even if we’re cat people, we just assume that dogs are
some people’s best friends. Additionally, even cat people (like me) cry at the
end of Old Yeller. So, what the hell is Fiedler talking about? I mean
Shakespeare must have something in his canon about dogs and friendship, and
what about the thousands of paintings done over the years—all those English and
Dutch painters with the kids and the dogs, the drunks and the dogs…what about
those?
So I
Googled it and discovered—lo and behold—Fiedler was essentially right. Okay,
Odysseus loved Argos, but here’s what Wikipedia has to say:
Previous
to the 19th century, dogs, other than lap dogs, were largely functional. Used
for activities such as hunting, watching, and guarding, language describing the
dog often reflected these positions within society. According to the Oxford
English Dictionary, “In the oldest proverbs and phrases dogs are rarely
depicted as faithful or as man’s best friend, but as vicious, ravening, or
watchful.”
The point
is, my graduate degree is in 18th and 19th century English literature and yet I
assumed that dogs have been man’s best friend for thousands of years, since
they were first domesticated. I took it as a given; I took it for granted. That
may not seem like a big deal—but it is. First of all, even ancillary research
(recall I’m reading Fiedler as sort of background for the novel in progress)
can get you thinking out of the box. It can (as it did for me) challenge
long-held or cherished assumptions. In other words, it jumpstarts your
creativity and that’s crucial for your writing.
Let’s look
at the second quick-research flight….and now I have a new image in my mind
about dogs—ravening, guarding snarling curs…. Now I’m thinking about all those
scrawny thinned-down pups who seem—at first glance—sort of part of the revels
in fifty zillion Dutch paintings but who are really not only not treasured, but
no more than useful (if that) to their owners. At this point I realize that
there could be a pirate’s trove of stories just looking at one 17th Dutch
painting from a different perspective. Not only that, I have this wonderful
thought about the change in our group thinking regarding dogs after the rabies
vaccine was invented. The two most famous rabid dogs are, of course, Old Yeller
and Tim Robinson in To Kill a Mockingbird…well, you get the idea: simple
research pays off. It might be a story I want to write when I finish this book,
it might be a scene I’d now insert into my current work. What if my character’s
fiancée gets rabies? Or her best friend? Or her mother? Or the geek in the
sideshow? If my book is about betrayal, what other “betrayal” motifs can be
portrayed through dogs as man’s best friend?
You get
the idea…and the best news of all is that it’s nearly infinite. The smallest
bit of time invested almost always yields—in addition to information—insights,
redefined thinking and huge creative jumps that can help your book or story
enormously.
So the
next time you’re about to write a scene that’s (ultimately) reminiscent of the
stuff the biggies in our industry have been writing about for hundreds of
years, try a little research…maybe you’ll find a wonderful way to combine what
you learn with the plot you have in mind and end up creating something entirely
different. A big pay off, in other words, for you and for your readers.
###
Lisa
Mannetti’s debut novel, The Gentling Box, garnered a Bram Stoker Award and she
has since been nominated three times for the prestigious award in both the
short and long fiction categories: Her story, “Everybody Wins,” was made into a
short film and her novella, “Dissolution,” will soon be a feature-length film
directed by Paul Leyden. Recent short stories include, “Esmeralda’s Stocking”
in Never Fear: Christmas Terrors; “Resurgam” in Zombies: More Recent Dead
edited by Paula Guran, and “Almost Everybody Wins,” in Insidious Assassins. Her
work, including The Gentling Box, and “1925: A Fall River Halloween” has been
translated into Italian.
In
addition to The Box Jumper, she has also authored The New Adventures of Tom
Sawyer and Huck Finn, two companion novellas in Deathwatch, a macabre gag book,
51 Fiendish Ways to Leave your Lover, as well as non-fiction books, and
numerous articles and short stories in newspapers, magazines and anthologies.
Forthcoming works include “Arbeit Macht Frei” in Gutted: Beautiful Horror
Stories and a novel about the dial-painter tragedy in the post-WWI era, Radium
Girl.
Lisa lives
in New York in the 100 year old house she originally grew up in with two wily
(mostly) black twin cats named Harry and Theo Houdini.
Visit her
author website: www.lisamannetti.com
Visit her
virtual haunted house: www.thechanceryhouse.com
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