How Much Research Do Writers Really Do?

Considering the matter of writers' writing from fiction--a tendency so extreme that they do so even when they are writing about that professional activity they know personally, writing--it seems that a good explanation is, besides the demand that they produce work according to formula to get their paychecks, their essentially impressionable natures.

Of course, considering that one might come to that question of the research writers are supposed to do.

This has always been much on my mind because the writers I gravitated toward tended to write "information-heavy" narratives, much of the interest of which was their showing us something of the world, which they often treated in "big picture" fashion, doing which well often entailed a very heavy burden of research. Even as I found myself reading fewer techno-thrillers and more science fiction, and then less science fiction and more of what we call "classics," this stayed with me--such that even as my personal reading consisted more than before of Capital L literature, it was people like Balzac and Zola and Sinclair and Dreiser who got my time and my respect.

These days I suspect that figures like them, who are pretty unfashionable these days (today literary critics are apt to ignore Balzac, mock at Zola's science-mindedness, deride Sinclair for "message," treat Dreiser as "a dead dog"), are also unrepresentative in this way, most writers doing very little research at all. There are often practical reasons for that, especially for those who find their ability to make enough money to live on are driven to work at high speed, with all that means for the opportunity to properly research their subject matter. However, that impressionability seems to have given them that other way of thinking about their subject matter even when they were not so pressed--with the crummy result that fills up our bestseller lists with dreck, as I find myself far more interested in Balzac and Zola and Sinclair and Dreiser than the works our retailers are ceaselessly trying to foist upon us today.