Using Photographs, Maps, and Art to Inspire and Inform Your Draft

My greatest career accomplishment to date is getting to call myself a professional nerd. Through a lot of hard work and even more pure luck, I managed to make a career out of my desire to delve into any topic that catches my interest and then make stories up about it. Currently, I write stories about a research botanist in 1920s London, which means that every time I sit down to write a Saffron Everleigh Mystery, I get to dig in (pun fully and unapologetically intended) to historical London, politics and fashion, and a whole lot of plants.

(How Birding Can Train a Writer's Attention.)

After five mysteries, I’ve finally nailed down a rhythm. A fair share of my brainstorming is actually research into the history and science that form the backdrop and centerpiece, respectively, of the mystery. I can’t even make it through a cursory outline before I’m researching to make sure the story is scientifically sound.

Some of things I learn are easily notated and incorporated into my writing—things like the symptoms of a poisoning, or the practices of an unfamiliar culture, as seen in the latest volume of Saffron’s adventures, A Botanist’s Guide to Tradition and Treachery. Saffron ventures to newly formed Turkey to work at an archeological dig site, researching ancient botanicals and their uses, only to be sabotaged at every turn, and eventually accused of a murder for which she and her fiancé must prove her innocence.

Other tidbits of knowledge are harder to seamlessly write into my stories. Saffron is a botanist, so I find myself spending long hours examining botanical illustrations and macro images of poisonous plants. She works at University College London, a real place I explore through Google Maps, historical floor plans, and YouTube videos. The Great War lingers in the background of all of Saffron’s adventures, and so I’ve spent far more time than I ever expected examining photographs of army uniforms, trenches, and those ghastly gas masks.

I use an app called Milanote to organize all my maps, photographs, illustrations, videos, and even sewing patterns. My endless boards have evolved into full-on book bibles. This app—not sponsored, by the way, but Milanote, seriously, call me—is my tried-and-true place to dump and organize all my ideas. With its ability to create documents, save images and links, even create drawings, I can put everything I need into a board and move things around as I like. I’ve created outlines, character profiles, floor plans with dozens of embedded reference images and color palettes, and even my own Save the Cat beat sheet template. It has a Chrome plug-in which allows you to save images directly from webpages to boards, eliminating the need to save them to your computer.

Any time I find a reference image of a WWI cavalry officer’s uniform or the perfect photograph of a Georgian house, I can not only save it to a board with ease, I can also drag it here and there until I’ve found the right place in a group of related images.

Before I used Milanote, I used Pinterest. I still use it, because nobody gets the vibes better than Pinterest. Between moody photographs, alluring landscapes, and as many snaps of vintage high fashion an author could ask for, it’s my destination whenever I need to make a moodboard. And yes, I do need to make moodboards. Not only do they get me excited to bring my vision to life, they help me clarify the vision. Do I want my writing to read in noir shades of black and white, the soft light of candles, or an overstimulating neon glare?

Truth be told, I nearly abandoned Pinterest as a repository for all things visual for my books because of the onslaught of AI slop. They now allow users to opt-out of AI pollution on their feeds. There is still AI-generated nonsense on there, even with the filter, so one must do their due diligence to spot it and avoid it. I avoid AI like the plague it is because, first, I disagree with it morally, but also because it cannot be trusted to provide me with real information on which to base my stories. I could never trust a map served up by ChatGPT because if it cannot easily scrape the desired information off the internet, it will make something up to fill in the blank and not tell me. I’d rather pull my hair out over not being able to locate a map of interwar Turkey than use something I have no means of authenticating.

Authentication is the trick in this AI-beleaguered timeline, but it need not be. Sticking with institutions that continue to be bastions for human knowledge are the antidote. Yes, it might take longer than a quick Google search, but it is worth it to find real information. I like The Met for photographs and even videos of historical objects, art, and clothing. Universities, cities big and small, and libraries are places you can trust to provide detailed, locale-specific information, and I’ve been blessed to find many staff members who are happy to help me find what I need. One such document that I refer to religiously came directly from the librarians at the University College London after a pleading email they were kind enough to respond to.

The final piece of this visual puzzle is bridging the gap between the eye and the page. I find it most effective when authors do this in the voice of the characters narrating the story. I cannot translate every brutal detail or emotional nuance of a character’s battle-scarred face from photographs of pre- and post-corrective surgery visage. And in truth, my characters would not notice every detail. They might focus on his eyes, a twisted bit of scar, or avoid looking at him altogether depending on their personality.

My mysteries are historical and often scientific, but I write for a modern audience. I can’t get too far in the weeds of minutiae. However accurate it might be to describe the broad panicles of a jacaranda flower and go into detail about the purple corolla, even in Saffron’s voice as a botanist, I have to remember that the average person won’t know what any of that means. It ends up as a bit of a running gag: Saffron or her equally nerdy love interest, bacteriologist Alexander Ashton, describing clues using jargon that must be translated into layman’s terms in the narrative. It’s characterization, voice, and information in one.

*****

Alexander continued, “I don’t know what it looked like in the tissue samples from the autopsy”—Saffron shuddered at the thought—“but it is very possible only one form showed up, making it harder to identify. The cell wall in the filamentous growth—”

“Thank you, I think I’ve heard enough,” Nick said.

*****

A final, evergreen bit of parting advice: Edit. It is tempting to try to communicate the entire picture of whatever reference we might use to inspire our writing. But our job is not to translate every feature of a map or painting; that only overloads and distracts the reader. I don’t describe the exact topography of Smyrna, Turkey in 1924, only depict its twisted streets as they inspire awe in Saffron and dread in Alexander when he’s lost in the midst of a heated chase. As with all research, an image’s relevance to us as writers is the extent to which it is relevant to our characters, and therefore, our readers.

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