Pop 89: In love with my research

By Madonna Hamel

Have you ever reached the end of a momentous chore and been surprised to find you’re not as ecstatic as you imagined you’d be? I recently finished a project seven years in the writing. But now that I’m here, I feel oddly sad. I’ve developed a relationship of sorts with my project—life is, after all, where we put our time and energy. And I’ve invested a great deal of both. But I also suspect perfectionism is telling me I can’t possibly be finished.

I’m no perfectionist when it comes to housekeeping and coiffing. But I can become irrationally idealistic and exacting when it comes to creating art and stories. And that can be a huge hindrance to completing projects and releasing them into the world, which is the goal of every artist and work of art—connecting with others through your work and your vision.

I’ve been told perfectionism leads to procrastination, which, if not nudged into action, leads to paralysis. What is worth doing is worth doing badly, with the option of improving on that by doing the best we can with what we have at the time. To live in the perfectionist’s world is to judge the work of others according to unrealistic standards. How many times have you left a concert or show and said, “I could do better than that”? In your dreams, yes. Or maybe you’d just do it differently. Either way, I say, “By all means, go for it!”

At the moment, I am dealing less with perfectionism than a kind of mourning for things left out. You never include everything you research, as juicy and interesting as it may be. I’ve been writing about the lives of a disparate group of misfits who find themselves living in the middle of nowhere—i.e., southern Saskatchewan—in the late 1800s. In doing research, I’ve learned a great deal about the lives of Métis living in the territory, of cowboys coming up from the States where they could still roam free, of mail-order brides, life in boarding houses, misinformed settlers arriving entirely unprepared, religious orders filled with good intentions, not all of them abusive or imperial in intent. I discovered the story of an apparition of Mary in the far North, diaries of former surveyors establishing the border, the first war correspondent and his stories of the Crimean War—to name just a few.

With every new character, scene, or event in the history of my unraveling story, there was a book to read. I fell in love with my research. It’s a pitfall for most novelists. It certainly was my case back in the days of working in radio, making documentaries on subjects that intrigued me and drew me deeper into them with every new fact. It’s the best way to become an expert on something—decide to write a book or make a doc about it!

I was lucky to have deadlines and the fear of dead air looming over me. If the clock was getting perilously close to showtime and I was still tinkering with my script—fretting over having to cut a precious factoid—my producer would shout: “Murder your babies, Madonna. We got a show to put on!”

However, left to our own devices, writers would spend their lives “reading up” on a subject. Beside my desk is a bookcase stuffed with hundreds of books on Victorian England, the rise of newspapers, the life of cowboys, the spirituality of Indigenous peoples, the beginning of consumer culture, the decline of the buffalo, the invention of the gospel of wealth, the building of barns, the wildest weather events of the last two centuries, the expansion of empires, the effect of train travel on land and people…the list goes on and on. And on.

I also have notebooks full of facts and figures, quips and quotes, and delicious, vibrant descriptions of a place and time. What do I do with all those notes I meant to plough into the story? The book would be thousands of pages long if I used them all. I can’t think of throwing away my notes. Please, let me share some of them here.

Did you know that the Gilded Age (1870 to late 1890s) saw the rise of sensationalist and investigative journalism at the same time that mindless materialism was wedded with the prosperity gospel and its notion that if you were rich, you were a good—i.e., hard-working—individual, and if you were poor, you were a bad—i.e., lazy—person? The man behind the Gospel of Wealth was Andrew Carnegie, the Pittsburgh steel magnate who we may think of as the benevolent originator of libraries, but whose ruthless business practices earned him the title: robber baron.

The Chicago World’s Fair (1893) introduced the art of “mechanical reproduction” and “staged authenticity” to the degree that fake everything was preferable to the original. Fake buildings went up faster. Fake pyramids meant no need to leave home. Fake battles meant no one dies, and fake happy villages of natives meant no more guilty consciences.

In 1898, Eastern Canada was hearing predictions of a bad wheat crop out West. Maclean’s hired Cora Hind to get the facts. She did what no reporter ever did before her—got off at every stop along the train route and spoke directly to local farmers. She stood in their fields, rubbed their wheat between her own fingers. She wired Maclean’s: “Not as bad as thought. Will be an average yield.” And she was right. She estimated a yield of 50 million bushels and was off by 4. The next year, she was off by less than 1.

My book begins in 1890—the year the stop sign, the semi-automatic rifle, and shredded wheat were invented. And it ends in 1893, the year Gandhi arrived in South Africa, Conan Doyle gave us Sherlock Holmes, and the song “Happy Birthday” was published. But in between, there’s so much more!