Researching nudity?
Yes. It happens. It’s necessary for writers. Writers do quite some research for books. Take something simple like a journey by plane. If you have someone board a plane in Atlanta Georgia, would it make sense to let the plane touch down 3 hours later in Sidney, Australia? Not unless it’s a kind of time-warping or really very amazingly fast plane. So that’s already where the research starts: how long would such a journey take? And what is the time difference, so when someone leaves Atlanta at 3 in the afternoon, what would be the time in Sidney upon arrival?
But where’s the nudity in all this?
Let’s look at the Naked Crow series I’m writing. There are Native Americans in there. Mexicans. Just to name a few ethnic groups. It requires quite some research to find out how those groups relate to nudity, now and also in the past (because that makes a big difference, believe me).
It’s important to get the facts as real as possible. If you were to read a story about a group of friends in Cleveland, Ohio that always frequent a bar in the nude, without any harassment from other people (let alone the police), would that be credible? I sincerely doubt that. (If you know of a group of friends in Cleveland, Ohio that gets away with it, I’d like to meet them!)
Research is crucial.
It really is. No matter how small or irrelevant a fact might be, you can’t just toss it in there assuming it’s going to be right. There’s always the chance someone reads it and knows it to be wrong. For instance something silly like driving. Did you know that traffic in South Africa drives on the left, like in England and Japan? Stuff like that can backfire. For instance for the Unsworth Manor Nudes I did a lot of research too, down to the family members of Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany and how those people looked at nudism, which was emerging at that time.Facts count and so research is paramount.
You might be surprised how much time of ‘writing a book’ disappears in research…