The Leeds School of
Art, Architecture Design

My confident approach to research – ie try not to do any - was tested recently when I was ‘invited’ (really ‘expected’ since I’d taken the flight and stayed in a nice hotel) to contribute to a Hungarian Literary Journal.

In 2011, to celebrate the Hungarian EU presidency, I, and twenty seven other writers, each representing one country of the European Union, were invited to the Budapest Book Fair.Each writer had to submit a grandly titled ‘Artes Poeticae of Writers in the European Union’ (an ego-boosting trumpeting of literary intent), attend a few goulash-heavy dinners, sit on several uber-serious panels (my first discussion was entitled, ‘Migrants and immigrants, natives and expats, autochton and allochton writers – Hybridization of European literature’) and finally write an essay for the literary journal.

I didn’t know the title of this final essay but I didn’t assume I’d have to do any research in preparation.As a novelist my aim has always been to research as little as possible, and instead trust the wild imagination. Re-hashing, I’d decided, is what usually comes of the writer re-searching. Research risks leaving the creative writer stuffed like a goose with knowledge, and the worst kind of knowledge; knowledge that we already know, or cliché .

Fiction writers do not need this kind of knowledge. We have little need of facts, impartiality, objectivity. Instead we need to fuel our characters with what humans naturally run on; passion, subjectivity, hunch and interiority. So, it has always seemed wise to stay away from research, particularly if you are writing contemporary fiction or drama.

Of course I know readers love writers to research – and no writer who aims to be rich and famous would ever admit to not researching. Whenever I visit festivals one of the first audience questions I’m asked is an excitable ‘Did you have to do lots of research?’ For my last novel, Spilt Milk, Black Coffee, about a relationship between a young Muslim man and an older white woman most questions at literary events were always around ‘What research did you do into the Muslim community?’ My audiences were worried by my admission that I’d done very little. It sounded dangerously naive and they wanted no part of it. 

Still, I didn’t think of research as part of what I did as a creative writer. At worst research is all about answers, when fiction at its best is the posing of questions. Sometimes, of course, you have to go rooting around checking things out, akin to research, because you are told to by someone who’s paying you, but this after-the-event correcting isn’t the same as pre-writing researching. The unchecked imagination has already spun the story.

Recently I had to check when exactly cranberry sauce introduced to England. I’d added it to a Radio 4 play because it made a good funny line, but the sharp-eyed producer was worried. ‘Did you research this? 1943 seems too early for cranberry sauce. Are you sure you’re sure?’ This is the BBC and they are very worried about verity, particularly in fiction.

Quickly, thanks to Google, I knew lots about cranberry sauce (producer was right of course; I was too early). Then the problems began. I had a greedy impulse is to cram all this accurate sauce info in. I wrote a new scene at the dinner table – because I’d done the sauce research and I wanted to show I’d done it. Of course all this sauce had nothing to do with character or story and eventually all of it had to go, and I was left refreshed in my belief that not researching is far more challenging, and interesting than researching. 

I was easy with having to nervily find some raw originality every time. Then I got the email from the Hungarian Literary Journal: 
‘What would you associate with the river Danube? Do you have any personal experiences with it? Have you ever thought of this grand river as containing a number of secrets… Famous contemporary Hungarian writers will join this project, however, we also would like to have your contribution: your text is expected to be connected to the Danube or even more, ideally to Budapest and the Danube, with real or fictitious persons, places or events.’

Worried, I made my way to the Danube and walked along it. I inhaled, gazed into the distance, listened keenly to the flow ,looked at the tram tracks that run close up to the banks. Still nothing. It was hard, knowing nothing of the Danube, to see it as anything other than a countrified Thames.


I didn’t’ have long; I needed help. So, I thought I’d better do what I know never to do. I Googled Danube and after I’d filtered out all the river cruises and Wikipedia info on river bed densities I had a comfy mattress of facts upon which to weave a pretentious tale with allusions to dark aspects of twentieth century European history (which I’d read about in the guide book). 


I threw out my first draft, then my second. Then I tried to think what really mattered to me and what I wanted to write about. What mattered to me was the movie adaptation of my last novel that I was in the process of writing. It had nothing to do with the Danube.


What about rivers generally? I’d grown up by a canal, and knew the humans would pay a premium to live by the water ,but that was in East Yorkshire not Hungary. The only thing I could think of that seemed original was a recent realization that the great moments in movie romances often take place by water, usually while the romancing couple are walking along a river bank. It was just a hunch, but that’s where all my writing starts.


I’d already tried to get such a romantic river moment into my own movie adaptation, but as the film takes place not in Paris, New York or Vienna, but in and around Leeds, it was looking unlikely.
Vienna. Faintly a distant bell was ringing. Vienna! Suddenly I had a flash of brilliant hopefulness, the kind that makes you crawl trembling to the computer, muttering prayers. One of my favourite movie river moments is in Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise. Was that Viennese river where our lovers meet the poet on the barge, the Danube? Please, I cried, let it be.


It wasn’t. But it was the Donaukanal, which is a close relative of the Danube (they merge). And I discovered that the train where Jesse and Celine first meet, is a train from Budapest. So, with the hopeful hocus pocus that gets all creative projects off the ground I trusted this was the way to go. I walked back to the Danube and thought of romance. Out of somewhere I remembered the John Agard poem, Nuptials, which contained the lines. ‘


‘River, be their teacher,

that together they may turn

their future highs and lows

into one hopeful flow
Two opposite shores

feeding from a single source.

I tried to trust what I hoped was true, that memory is the writer’s research. I remembered other hunches about love and rivers and out of this I spun the article, which became a meditation on rivers, movies and romance. I sent it in, they liked it and even quoted from it on the back of the book.

So, that’s a long way of considering how a writer who doesn’t believe in research does research. Or rather that’s how a writer who can do without too many readers does research.

Helen Cross’s latest novel is Spilt Milk, Black Coffee (Bloomsbury), which she is in the process of adapting for the screen.