MonsterLibrarian.com is pleased to be a part of the blog tour for Chelsea Quinn Yarbro’s new book, An Embarrassment of Riches. We asked Chelsea to tell us about her experiences with libraries and how she does the research for her books. What she shared with us here is really inspiring, and I’m excited about having the chance to read her book and tell you all about it later this month.  Thanks, Chelsea!

Libraries, Research, and Horror Fiction
by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro

It has been said that to become a writer is to condemn yourself to a lifetime of homework, which is true as far as it goes, but not such an onerous burden to those of us who like homework.  Since I was a kid, I’ve collected books — I still do, and I have a pretty good research library in my basement which I use fairly often.  Most of my dictionaries are at my left shoulder in my office, and some basic texts on a wide variety of subjects — the history of weapon, ships, trade, fabric, clothes, shoes, food, travel, vehicles, architecture, horses, science, engineering, and art, to mention those I can see by turning my head — all very useful for a writer.

For the more specific questions, I have another pair of approach — the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, and grad students.  The Cal libraries are a splendid source of all kinds of information.  As a trained cartographer, I’m particularly fond of the map room, and although there are a number of books of maps in my own library, Cal has a truly wonderful collection that I love to explore.  When I have a sense of a locale, I have a much better feel for the story that takes place in it, so what I gain from the map room I find invaluable.  The one thing I would advise anyone using the Bancroft Library, or any university library, to make a list of the subjects you intend to research, otherwise you’re apt to be overwhelmed by the volume of information available to you.

Now, about grad students: when I have a subject I need to research that is either controversial or about which there is relatively reliable information available, or for that matter, if I want to be able to ask questions, I contact a grad student in the field in which I’m researching, and take him or her to lunch, and encourage her or him to expound on the topic while I take notes and ask questions.  Once in a while, I’ll take two grad students to lunch and listen to them disagree, which I find a very useful tool in sorting out various thorny problems encountered in doing historical research as part of the preparation for writing novels.

When I was working on An Embarrassment of Riches, I had some doubts about a few of the historical sources I had used, and took a grad student to lunch, and asked him what he could tell me about the impact that Bohemia’s war with Hungary had on Queen Kunigunde’s Court — the Queen was the grand-daughter of King Bela of Hungary and the wife of King Otakar II of Bohemia.  It struck me that there might be various kinds of spying going on in such a Court, and if so, who was spying on whom?  I also had read up on trade in Bohemia, since at the time it was the richest kingdom in Europe; I could find relatively little information on what that did to trade.  In this case, it was two grad students, and they had a lively debate which ended up telling me a lot about the Guilds of Prague.  Not quite what I was after, but extremely useful, and it allowed me to put in a chapter about formal civic occasions.

Another advantage of living near a major university is that there are many people in the area who have extensive private libraries, and genuine expertise, who are willing to share their books and their knowledge with me.  This is an enjoyable side of research, since I get to meet many interesting people while garnering necessary information.  I usually find these people by asking some of my friends and neighbors if they know anyone with good information about — and then I fill in what I want to know.

Probably one of the most difficult things to find out in regard to history is what people wore when they were schlepping around the house, or to put it another way, the equivalent of jeans and a t-shirt.  Another tricky thing to find is what they ate for breakfast, meaning nothing fancy, just ordinary breakfast.  These two questions have taken up more of my time in more of my historical books than anything else, largely because people tend to record what is unusual, or out of the ordinary, not what they do every day.  But it is those ordinary things that let the fiction writer gain a feel for the time and its people, and it is usually those ordinary things that produce the telling details that bring the time into sharp relief.  This is one of the reasons I find household records from the period I’m researching so useful.  Legal codes are another good source of information, although their literary style tends to be arid at best.  One book I have that I often consult is on the history of weather in Europe from the time of Socrates to the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, which includes many contemporary accounts of crop yields and shifts in weather, both of which have at least as much impact as trade, disease, and wars.

See what I mean?  A lifetime of homework.  Bring it on.