All right, this is likely to be the dumbest article about writing I’ve read in a while: An author complaining that the Internet makes researching too easy:
Recently I have been attempting to write a novel that I have decided should take place in a small village in Romania; nowhere else will do. Yet, I’ve never been to Romania. I also have no disposable income to pay for a trip there, nor a benevolent publisher who might cover the cost of the trip under the guise of “research”.In days gone by, this would have caused a problem. To accurately portray a country as unfamiliar as Romania is to me, I would have had to spend weeks, months even years in libraries digging out facts about population, geography, cultural preferences, history and so forth in order to create a believable backdrop against which to set the story. I might have spoken to people from that country, or those who had visited it; maybe sampled indigenous foods, listened to music – anything to get a better feel for the place.
That process is changing. Nowadays, thanks to the internet and its many search engines writers can conduct their research at a much-accelerated pace. Chief among the millions of web resources is its most frequently-visited encyclopedia, Wikipedia…
Okay, let’s stop right there. First, any writer who uses Wikipedia as a primary resource, as this fellow claims to, is a credulous moron. Wikipedia has many delightful uses, to be sure, and much of their information is fine, but its very “anyone can change anything” nature makes it a bad primary source for anything, not the least an entire country.
Second, the problem is not that the Internet makes it too easy to research. The problem is that the Internet enables this fellow to craft an excuse for his own lazy research. In effect, what he’s saying is “if there’s some information out there which I find minimally sufficient for my needs that I can find in less than a minute, I don’t feel the urge to put in the extra time to make my work any more credible.” Additionally, he’s saying “If I make make it look like the Internet is the problem, people may not notice I’m extraordinarily lazy sod.”
Well, nice, try, fella. didn’t work. The problem is not with the Internet, it’s with you.
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