The town historian (since passed away) and I hit it off from the start. My home of Chicago is about a three-and-a-half-hour drive to Bath, which is about twenty miles from the Michigan state capital of Lansing. He was the key I needed to unlock the story. One of the first pages I found on the crime listed a contact who was the self-styled “town historian” of Bath. I began my research in 2005, what we might call the Iron Age of web pages. It would be downright foolish to do that. They know how to dig into their collections and point you in other directions and collections.

Good reference librarians are your best friend.

You can Google that number.Īnother joke: what did we do before Google? Answer: the original Google, your local public library. Consider how many narrative nonfiction books were written before Google. There’s an old joke - at least “old” in Internet years: How do you bury a secret? Answer: put it on the secondpage of a Google search. WhileGoogle has merits, I’m not convinced it’s the best resource for information. The first thing I checked out is the research hotbed of choice these days: Google. (Read up on the story first if you’re not familiar with it, then return to this blog post.) As example of how research is done, let’s focus on how I did a deep dive in gathering sources for my book Bath Massacre: America’s First School Bombing. Now begins the next phase, which is sometimes the most fun aspect of authoring a book: your research. In last week’s blog you learned how to find right story for your nonfiction narrative. Stay tuned for next week’s post, showing you how to pull together your research into a compelling tale, with a guide to narrative structure, character, plotting, and citing your sources. This week we’re looking at research techniques, tips, and tricks. Here’s the second in our series of narrative nonfiction building blocks.

Bath Massacre by Arnie Bernstein