Well I’m on the research trip, finally. Three days in and I have found out enough to make maybe two or three hundred words of book. I’m beginning to wonder why I came down. There are limits to the charms of hotel rooms when you know you should be out trying to get clannish locals to refuse to tell you anything in yet another colourfully country way.
This is way outside my comfort zone. In the day job I’m used to going places where the press are expected and there’s a gang of us. Where the only proviso is that you get the facts presented to you in the right order as quickly as possible. Actually planting myself in a small market town in Ireland and expecting people to open up as if I was their long lost relative…let’s just say I don’t think I thought this through sufficiently.
Of course, the fact that it’s been raining since I got here to almost biblical proportions isn’t helping the mood. I’m used to sitting in a corner and observing. There’s a reason why I don’t do the tabloid investigative stuff. Strange though it may seem I don’t get a kick out of getting doors slammed in my face.
I’m very conscious of the fact that I’m not the only one writing a book on this subject and I’m painfully aware that my nemesis is holed up somewhere near here having done all her research all ready and tap, tap, tapping away at the keyboards while I trudge the streets, get doors slammed in my face and somehow don’t have time to work. I’m going to have to extend my stay and that’s even more time away from my desk and days when I can happily spend 15 hours staring at the screen.
I prefer researching records or weaselling things out of the Net, at least then when you’re waiting for a reply you can just type on regardless. At the moment I am spending hours upon hours trudging around in circles on the same rain soaked streets.
Why did I say I would write this bloody thing? Give me fiction any day where an excursion like this would be an oasis of tranquility that would actually help the creative process while I spent my days scribbling away in coffee shops before holing myself up in my room to type for hours only venturing down for a bit to eat or a late night drink in the bar. You see I’ve been wanting to do this for so long I have a romanticised notion of what the single (for practical purposes anyway) female writer gets up to on a research trip.
Getting drenched several times a day while I walk round in circles trying to find the next bogus lead was not the way it was supposed to go! Anyone I’ve spoken to has travelled to places like this to get material for a couple of thousand words at most. I’m looking for inspiration for around twenty thousand.
Trouble is at the moment, I can’t the hard bitten hack because I’m not really here as a journalist; I can’t to the windswept and interesting bohemian writer because to all practical purposes I’m one step short of being a writer (not with this much digging anyway). I can’t sit back and wait because I know I’ve not got long but I can’t go in guns blazing because I don’t want to alienate people who I need to pour out their hearts to me.
At this stage I would be content to turn it all into an ass kicking feature, but that’s not really an option. I’ve over thirty thousand words to write in a fortnight and I need to get people to talk to me somehow. The sun’s come out for a couple of minutes and it’s faking a summer’s day out there. I’d better go back to the trudging and rejection…
