How did people write things before the internet?

[kiya]

I got an attack story.

So I wrote it over the last couple of days, and in that time I have done for research:

* measured a cardboard box
* looked up how crime scene evidence is labelled and stored
* looked up crime scene photography
* looked up how to document blood spatter
* looked up a bunch of stuff involving children's literature
* looked up which of the Lang Fairy Books a particular story could be found in
* owl anatomy: feather structure and coloration; talons; general shape
* how to store powder evidence (accidentally discovered, really, but I used it)
* that tooth numbering system
* what the fuck is that thing that hangs around the bottom of the bed called, anyway?
* handwriting analysis
* miscellaneous Arthurian names, actually, though that bit's almost 100% invisible in practical terms
* hand size by age
* shoe size by age
* conversion of various measurements to metric

I did not look up what trackers can do because I know ivy, I could just footnote what the tracker spotted without having to look up what was plausible.

All of that digging up details and stuff? Was for a story that is, after revision to be longer, 2171 words long.


In unrelated news, Mo the Noodle has finally eaten something. We are relieved.

Comments

[graydon]

Yay, Mo's appetite!

I try not to go off on rants about this, but the availability of knowledge today is way way off into lost-in-elfland. (There's more than one phone app that just labels the night sky you're pointing it at, at way under a degree of pointing accuracy. "show satellites" is a switch. This is not so much the hundred gramme encyclopaedia as "everyone have a helpful daemon". And that's one thing. And, somehow, bewilderingly, almost no one has noticed.)

OF COURSE modern writing expectations are different (= much higher) than historically; a lot of the kerfuffle in fandom comes down to the fanficcer intolerance of making shit up. (there's a material canon, and it's the same awkward conversation as all the other constructions of canon, you have to have a reason to disdain it.) Which is, well, I figure there's at least a couple PhDs in figuring out how that happened. (and a few more in a different field in pointing out what it does to writing when you've stopped going for the impression of verisimilitude and have started feeling obliged to put real verisimilitude into your text, and what that does to the construction of fantasy and how you get niche genres partitioned around permissible implausibility. Old-school SF was anything that made you feel that sensawunda and smart at the same time; the modern expectation is that you've got a very definite budget for the unreal. What kind, and how much, are something the reader expects to have labelled going into novel length works.)

You've got a thoroughly modern expectation that all the real stuff will be real real stuff. So, yay! internet and the facilitation of research.

[kiya]

I had a comment to one of my first readers about making sure the story had sufficient truthiness.

[graydon]

I am much inclined to assert that of course you did. :)

May the truthiness be found resplendent and fractal!

[ivy]

Happy to be of service!

[kiya]

I suspect this is a case that would drive you mildly up a tree as a tracker, really. ;)

[ckd]

What, no looking up red dye recipes that use Octorok eyeballs? :-D

[kiya]

The possible dyes involved in the story are yellow and green and of unknown provenance. ;)