Kyle Mills | Research: The Art of Not Making Things Up

I’ve learned a lot about novel writing in the more than ten years I’ve been doing it, but most of those lessons came with my first, Rising Phoenix.

People really care about the books they read. And I love that.

Unfortunately, I wrote Rising while I was working full time, so there was no way for me to scout the exotic locations I included. And the Internet didn’t exist yet, so casually clicking my way to enlightenment wasn’t an option. I did the best I could with magazine articles and encyclopedias until the excitement of finding a publisher made me completely forget the stuff I’d glossed over.

Oh, the angry letters I got. From Poland (Warsaw is apparently not as seedy as I imagined), from firearms experts (can’t put a safety on a revolver, you know), and from Texans (there are indeed good Indian restaurants in Houston.) But my favorites, which I still occasionally receive, are the ones addressed in pencil. I know immediately that they’re from someone in prison who is going to point out that you can’t smoke crack out of a plastic pipe. They always start so politely with something like “Dear Mr. Mills: My credentials in this area are impeccable. I am serving 20 years to life on a drug charge…”

My latest book, Lords of Corruption, is about a crooked aid agency and a young American who gets duped into working for it. As a full time writer, I had the luxury of spending a winter driving around the southern part of Africa to get a feel for the place and I can’t count the number of times I said “you just can’t make this stuff up.”

My wife and I were in little village in Namibia one night and were eating at the only place that served food—a hotel/bar/restaurant in the middle of town. We got to talking to the owner because I had to know why there was a guy mowing the hotel’s lawn with a pair of scissors (answer: he needed a full-time job and if I gave him a lawn mower, he’d get done too fast.)

It turns out that in addition to running the hotel, the owner was also the bartender, the chef, a farmer, and a prospector. He’d just gotten back from being stuck alone in the desert when his truck’s engine quit. He hadn’t panicked, though. He’d just gone about his business digging for precious stones and put a sign on his windshield saying he was broken down. Six days later, someone finally came by.

“It must have been a relief to get out of there,” my wife said.

His brow furrowed. “Oh, I didn’t leave. I had a line on some nice stones. I just asked them to swing by the Range Rover dealer on their way home and tell them I needed a new alternator.”

The next week, a kid, who had been walking for three days, showed up with the part in his bag.

We had a great meal (zebra roulade as I recall) and hung around chatting. About midnight, a white Namibian showed up with a German National Geographic film crew and started knocking back beers. It turned out that he was a pathological liar and we spent the wee hours being entertained by stories of his exploits in Angola’s civil war and deadly run-ins with albino alligators in the New York sewers.

Seriously, you just can’t make that stuff up…