Starting Out
A walking week: cheap research for a first book
The cheapest research trip for a childrens book is a week of walking in the landscape the book needs. Here is how to plan one, and what a Dutch walking culture gets right about it.
The cheapest research trip for a childrens book is a week of walking in the landscape the book needs. No archive fee, no conference rate, just a map, a notebook and the price of a bed. A Dutch magazine about holidays in the country's nature, De Eik, covers the version the Netherlands does best: forest, heath and stream valley on foot, with the bungalow as the base and the walking route as the day's work. The habit translates directly to a first book's fieldwork.
The Dutch model is worth borrowing because it is the opposite of the research trip as a grand gesture. The bungalow is cheap, the walking is free, and the notebook is where the work happens.
Why a walking week works for a first book
A first book's research is not a library problem; it is a landscape problem. The book needs to know what the hill looks like at dusk, where the path gives out, what the weather does to the field. A week of walking answers all of it, and it answers it in the register a picture book or a middle grade novel needs: the sensory, the particular, the observed.
The De Eik coverage describes the Dutch version of the week: the forest routes through the Drents-Friese Wold, the heath walks, the villages with their green squares called brinks. The writer who takes the same week in the Carolinas has the same structure: a base, a series of day walks, and a notebook that fills itself.
How to plan the week
The planning is the cheap part. Pick the landscape the book needs, pick a base within walking distance of it, and give each day a route and a question. The route is the walk; the question is what the book needs to learn from it. A farm story needs the field edges and the barn's shadow; a forest story needs the understory and the light under the canopy.
The Dutch walking network makes the route-finding easy, because the marked paths are a system: the long-distance routes, the local loops, the signposted junctions. The Carolinas have their own version in the state parks and the trail networks, and the writer who picks the marked routes is not being unoriginal; they are being able to find the same view twice.
| Day | What the walk covers | What the notebook gets |
|---|---|---|
| Arrival | The base, the first evening walk | The smell, the light, the sounds |
| Days two to five | The routes the book needs | The details the plot will use |
| Rest day | A village, a museum, a long lunch | The human texture |
| Last day | The route the book will end on | The closing image |
What the notebook has to be for
The walking notebook is not a diary; it is a field guide to a book that does not exist yet. The useful entries are the ones that will be checked against the draft later: the time the light changed, the name of the plant, the way the path forked. The unuseful entries are the ones that try to write the book on the walk.
The week ends when the notebook is full enough to write from, which is usually before the week ends. The point is not to see everything; it is to see the things the book needs, and to see them well enough to describe them from memory six months later.
The off-season week
The Dutch magazine's calendar advice applies doubly to the writer's week: the landscape in the off-season is the landscape the book will probably need. A beach town in October, a forest path in November, a farm lane in the week before planting: the off-season shows the working landscape, not the postcard, and the working landscape is what a story can use. The bungalow parks empty, the trails clear, and the notebook fills faster because the country is not performing for anyone.
For the same kind of fieldwork applied to a period the book needs to get right, our piece on researching a period world a reader can check covers the archive version, and the room a finished draft needs is the subject of learning the rules of a new room.
The week does not have to be far away to work. A Carolina farm county in October is as strange a landscape to a child reader as a Dutch heath, and the notebook does not care whether the path it recorded was in Drenthe or Davie County. What the book needs is the particular, and the particular is wherever the writer bothered to walk.
About the source
Wandelnet is the Dutch walking network that maintains the country's marked long-distance routes, and its public pages describe the route system, the signage and the planning tools the week's routes follow.