Tuesday, May 24, 2016

creative writing - Researching sensitive subjects


How do you research subjects for a novel that might be sensitive? Both cultural and jurisdictional.


Example: I usually try to "research" the setting and characters for my texts from real life. When I wrote a story about a priest I visited a lot of old churches and graveyards just to get a "feeling" for the place.



Now I'm planning to write a story where the main character is a 12-13 year old girl. Since it's a long time that I was in that age myself I wanted to get a feeling for what you look like at that age, some vocabulary and so on. Therefore I sat down with my friend Google and typed in a search string looking for girls around 12 years.


Just before hitting the enter button I was struck by what I was doing. Oh-no this looked so wrong in so many ways even though my intentions where honorable.


So how do you do it?




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