![]() ![]() And the research can give a writer some unexpected gifts. One example: in World War I, the draft age was twenty-one, not eighteen as it was for later wars. And if I then hadn’t done the research, I might have made some very basic errors. ![]() But I had to write the story up to that point to discover that I needed to understand that. For instance, in a previous novel, The Garden of the World, I discovered that I needed to understand how the military draft for World War I worked, and so I read accounts of it in memoirs and in newspapers from 1917. In my experience, it’s the writing itself that tells you what you need to know, and where the gaps are in your knowledge. You would be setting yourself an impossible goal. While it’s important to understand the historical context sufficiently to conceive of the story, I think it’s a grave error to wait until your research is complete before you begin writing. ![]()
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