Research and how much of a story ought to be true?

I was researching an essay on Dinosaur Footprints and I decided to include  North Brother Island, which is an abandoned quarantine island between the Bronx and Queens.

There is an abandoned leper colony in America, right next to NYC… If you look at it online then you can see the devastation, the trees growing through buildings and those buildings being swallowed by a relentless nature. Yet North Brother Island is squeezed between the Bronx and Queens. Used for the quarantine of Typhoid Mary, a female who insisted on working as a cook despite being a carrier of typhoid and causing at least two outbreaks, the island wasn’t abandoned until 1963. If this sort of devastation can occur in only 50 years what will be there in a thousand?

from Dinosaur Footprints

For some fabulous photos please go to this blog and have a look, they are beautiful, disturbing and horrific at the same time, and all pictures of abandoned buildings… But if you consider that the island wasn’t abandoned until 1963 then the stage of devastation that can be seen is amazing…

As I got my facts together I started to realise that I do this research with every story… The essay I was writing was a piece of non-fiction but usually I put as many facts in as I can, even if the story is about something completely made up. Take the extract below from a piece called Oil and Water:

The hall and the kitchen were the same place, orange cupboards stuck on the walls as an afterthought; fridge freezer rising above the banister like some squatting rumbling toad, complaining of a half empty belly. The toilet was actually outside, well sort of. You went through a covered way and there was the bathroom.

From Oil and Water

All these aspects are fact. We lived in this house, or actually two houses – one with an outside loo and the other with the kitchen/hallway configuration. I think the ‘real-ness’ of the description makes the story (a crime thriller) seem more believable.

I’ve just been reading a book and it too is a crime thriller and good – nail biting good – that was until it came to one of the murders… Here they use a fish-hook, intestines and a Great White Shark to kill a person… I won’t go into it as the murder was pretty gruesome but lets just say I am uncertain if you can get access to someone’s small intestine with a small cut above the belly button. It just killed the story dead. I wanted to believe in this killer who, up to this point was incredible, and then I didn’t. Was it the reasearch or the way it was written?

I don’t know, I just try to put as much ‘fact’ in a story as I can, even when there appears not to be a factual thing about it. It does beg the question though whether I’m limiting my writing. Perhaps as an exercise I ought to write something without a shred of fact I can back up… but would my characters be believable or would I just create something that has no hope of holding a reader?

In this bit of writing I use an abandoned building to set a scene, and I think it works well (the building was researched and photographed and I even drew out plans for the upstairs and downstairs so that later in the story/book I could have characters move around without getting lost or confused at their locations).

Inside the house was silence. Outside children played and lawnmowers tracked back and forward. Neighbours chatted or yelled at each other and almost every house had a man or boy washing a car. Not one car was over five years old. Each house was painted white, with only the front door showing any sign of individuality. Blue here and green there, one controversial neighbour had even inset a stain glass window with a rose. The gossip that had created had been incredible, the hedge peerers and wall climbers had kept it up for over four months. Still it is a normal neighbourhood. Suburbia gone mad, but normal.

Except for the end house, a corner plot. You would have thought that this would have been sought after, but somehow a rumour had begun and the house had never sold. The bank had taken it and should anyone view it, then a hasty word to a neighbour would send the prospective buyers running. At first the bank had cut the hedge and the grass, even painting the house a brilliant white, but over time fewer people came to look and the bank washed their hands. No need to do anything if no one wanted to see the place.

The brilliant white paint had peeled and mould had grown as well as moss, leaving ugly brown and green stains until the house resembled a piece of rotting cheese. The garden had become a jungle and the hedges so high and untamed that no neighbour ever looked over them, no one was tall enough. Even the children didn’t play in the front garden and should a ball come hurtling from the street then a series of dares and pushes were needed before some brave soul would fetch it.

Still the house waited, its rooms gathering dust and spiders spinning lace from the ceilings. Had anyone tried to look in they would have seen nothing but an empty house. Yet rumour continued, no one really knowing when or where it had begun, but by the time everything changed it had grown into a killer, no, a murderer or even a serial killer. That blood was meant to coat the walls and the floor was tacky with it. No detergent would touch it, and if you cleaned it up it would just appear again.

From Dragon (working title)

This extract grips you, but is it the style or writing or the research that has made it believable?