If you’re expecting this post to be about doing research for a novel you may have in the works, that’s nice and I applaud your incentive, but that’s not what I had in mind when I sat down to write. Instead of commenting on doing the research that invariably comes with writing a novel, I want to talk a little about doing research instead of writing a novel.
I have a PhD degree in virology, the science of working with viruses, and when I got the degree in 1971, I set my sights on doing original research, eventually in my own lab, working on what I wanted to work on. That eventually happened, and I began a research project on how viruses aggregate (clump together) and how disinfectants work when they killed the virus. After all, viruses cause disease, so what could be better than killing them before they infect someone and make them sick?
And so, I started out, and along the way I got into other phases of virology, namely clinical virology where those of us who work in a hospital laboratory try to identify what viruses a patient has so that we can help the doctor make a diagnosis and, potentially, help the patient get well. There’s a lot of original research that goes along with doing that type of work, and I did a lot of research on the AIDS virus, HIV, as well as several other viruses. I found it very interesting stuff.
But now in retirement I write novels and short stories. That’s quite a change from virology. Instead of original research, I do original imaginative writing. If that seems like quite a jump, it is, er, was. Original research requires reading the scientific literature in one’s field and taking the next step and publishing a scientific paper on the results. That adds to the total sum of knowledge about a certain subject. Imaginative writing on the other hand, requires reading other novels and stories by other authors in one’s field and doing something quite a bit different. But there is one facet of both that makes the work extremely gratifying: the fact that I am doing something (writing/research) that no one else has done before. It’s all original to me. My virology work was published in peer-reviewed journals, a testament to their originality, and my short stories possess the same characteristic of originality. My novels will most likely be self-published, and so I can’t theoretically claim originality, but the act of writing a novel almost certainly guarantees that it will be original. I doubt you will ever read a novel exactly the same as mine. Like research, writing is also very interesting stuff. Try it some time.
And so, now I have to wrap this up and get back to writing.