Research and Writing Advice from a Political Scientist / Fantasy Author

My day job is advising political science students on their research theses. It struck me today, that all the fiction craft I had been studying while I was unemployed actually has applications for researching and writing theses! So, for my academically-inclined readers, this one is for you.

Your Research Question is Your Promise. Don’t Promise What You Can’t Deliver!

I am a huge fan of Brandon Sanderson’s writing lectures. The most important takeaway for me was the promise-progress-payoff framework. You make a promise to your readers, then you make readers feel that they are making progress towards that promise, and then you deliver readers a payoff on that promise.

Within that framework, the key is the promise. You have to get the promise right. Whether its a promise about tone or character arc or genre, no matter how “good” of a book you write, your readers will be disappointed if you do not deliver on the promise you make them in the first chapters if not the first couple pages.

Your research question is the promise that your thesis must deliver on. If you cannot deliver on it, then it is better to not make that promise at all. Because your reader (i.e., your grader) will only be disappointed that you promised them something shiny and exciting and failed to deliver on that because the data doesn’t exist, you ran out of time, et cetera, et cetera.

Want to research the effect of X on Y (Y being something measurable)? Great. Do you want to research the effect of X on the global international order? Don’t. You can’t define “global international order” satisfactorily enough for a contemporary positivist scholar. Ergo, you can’t answer it. Do you want to research the effect of X on Y and the global international order? Again, you’re setting yourself up for failure because now the reader expects you to answer the second part of the question, but you can’t. That’s just one simplistic example, but anytime you raise a question you raise expectations. Don’t raise a question you can’t answer. State how unknowable something is. Discuss the limitations that make it impossible to understand a phenomenon perfectly.

But only ask what you can answer. Empirically. (Assuming you are writing an empirical research thesis.) Bonus tip: this also means only ask what the data exists to answer the question with.

So What? Raise the Stakes

I can’t credit any single writing coach with this advice, but there is a lot of advice in fiction writing about raising the stakes, or at least, clarifying the stakes.

The same applies to framing your research: Why does it matter that we know the answer to the question you asked? Why does it matter that we get it right? What could go wrong if we answer the question wrong? You should be able to answer the question in plain English; no hiding behind academic jargon.

This is critical for all researchers, but especially you are working in the interpretivist tradition. This tradition emphasizes the importance of subjective meanings and interpretations. A lot of it focuses on how people, states, et cetera talk about things. For example, how leaders talk about Japan’s identity. Which is interesting, maybe, but the stakes are low. Japan’s economic condition, security situation, and so forth matters a lot more to me understanding Japan than how Japanese people talk about Japan’s identity. So, if you are an interpretivisit, the onus is on you to argue that understanding how people talk about a thing is at least as important as objective realities. Raise the stakes. Tell us, if we misunderstand how Japanese people talk about Japanese identity, what are we going to misunderstand about Japanese policy? How will that harm us? You want a reader’s reaction to your research to be more than, “I guess that’s nice to know.”

Though I am a positivist scholar, I will evaluate interpretivist research on its own merits, within its own tradition. However, you have to prove to me that it matters. In other words, make the stakes high enough for me to care about the answer to your research question. In fiction, we are asking, “What will go wrong for the characters if they do not get this right?” In your research, you should be asking, “What will go wrong with how we make policy, how we are relating to this country, if we do not get the answer to this question right?” Raise. The. Stakes. Make the reader care about your answer.