A little late to the dance, but The Believer's recent interview with Dana Spiotta was very interesting, especially for those interested in research and/or interested in her specific research for constructing Eat the Document. My favorite bit:
"The real interesting thing about research is when it gets to the point where you feel the speech rhythms of the time. It isn't so much slang as the rhythm. I tried to read a lot of primary documents, like the underground radical papers, the second-wave feminists -- not just what they saw but how they say it, the various groups, the manifestos and the essays written at the time rather than reading the essays that were written thirty years later looking back -- I read them to feel the language, the syntax, the diction, the rhythm. Because that's all part of capturing the specific cultural moment. The deeper you go, the more it yields."
While I find research to be so lovely that I sometimes lose my way entirely (nothing new here, I know), I think Spiotta's points about going to the source -- instead of a summary or analysis of the source many years later -- is critical in so many aspects of writing...not simply research for writing fiction. It is the one thing that bugs me about translation -- the what am I missing bit...the what has been filtered out bit. The rhythms of the native language, I feel certain, are not the same. What's missed when the rhythms are missed?
