Straight from the Source: Sarah-SoonLing Blackburn on Writing Historical Non-Fiction
How do you conduct your research?
My research usually goes through several phases. I like to familiarize myself in broad strokes with the topic before I begin. This lets me have a baseline understanding and also helps me identify areas that will make for an interesting narrative. Exclusion and the Chinese American Story is non-fiction, but it was still very important for me that it have a narrative flow and compelling characters for the reader to relate to. So during this early phase of research, I was identifying parts of the history that would make for a good story or places where I wanted to look for individual stories that I could highlight. Once I get into the actual drafting, the research gets much more granular. Now I know what holes I need to fill in or what details I need to paint a vivid picture in the reader’s mind. The best feeling is when one idea or one source leads me to another, and another, and another – the research process is a bit like archeology, and it can be a lot of fun! The hardest part is knowing what discoveries to include in the final text, so outlining after my initial research but before I get too in the weeds helps me stay focused.
What kinds of sources do you use? The more specifics here, the better!
I’m pretty wide-ranging in the types of sources I like to use. I primarily rely on the internet these days, but I’m happiest when I’ve found a well-researched book that I can learn from. For Exclusion and the Chinese American Story, some of my favorite sources were newspaper archives and local historical societies. They were critical in finding perspectives of people from the past, from their own point of view, and the narratives of lesser-known individuals. I also think it’s good to expand our searches beyond “traditional” sources. Documentaries, podcasts, oral histories, and other places can be just as rich. This is particularly true for those of us who write about people and time periods that have often been overlooked or underrepresented in more traditional, academic publishing. There are so many other sources of information (with verification, of course!) that are just as valid and can sometimes shed far more light on our topics than we’d have if we overlooked them.
How long do you typically research before beginning to draft? At what point do you feel comfortable beginning to draft? How does your research continue once you begin writing?
Honestly, I have a hard time not drafting when I begin researching. I’ll encounter a compelling idea in my research, and I’ll need to write it down right away! So I’m writing from the very beginning. At first it’s mostly an outline, but I’ll still write full passages and slot them in here and there if I’ve found something I know that I want to include in this early phase. Then I go back through to draft everything out, which includes much deeper research throughout. I don’t think I ever stop researching, because even when I’m doing my final tweaks there are still details I know I can add. For example – I wrote a section about Chinese miners during the California Gold Rush. It was fine, but I knew that it could be more compelling. So even in the late phases of editing I was going through and looking up more information to be able to paint a picture of the daily life of a miner. This makes it more real for the reader, but of course I don’t have that knowledge first-hand so I had to go back to my sources to find out.
What is your favorite thing about research?
Sometimes you stumble across an obscure source that opens up a treasure trove of information for your story. Early on in Exclusion and the Chinese American Story, I tell the story of Yee Ah Tye, an important Association member in the early years of Chinese immigration to California. There were a few things about him online, but it was mostly sketchy biographical details. I’m not sure how exactly I found it – I know it didn’t pop up in Google searches – but after several days of looking for more of his story I found a PDF that included the findings of some archaeological digs at one of the Association boarding houses that he was connected to. By looking at the animal bones that were found, they could tell what the important Association members were eating. It was a lot better than what the average Chinese immigrant ate. Paired with newspaper reports about a New Year’s feast that Yee Ah Tye hosted and stories about the food offerings left at his burial, now I had a much more detailed, vivid picture of the man himself. There were so many times I found a random source that opened up a whole new level of depth to the story, and it was a joy every time.
What’s your least favorite thing about research?
This sounds so small, but I still hate tracking all of my sources. I’ll often have five, six, seven sources that inform a single sentence – after all, I’m looking to synthesize factual information and retell it in a compelling narrative. I get all excited writing that sentence and I want to keep writing, so I’ll forget to stop and make note of exactly which piece of information came from which source. I end up having to spend whole days going back and cleaning all of that up. It’s not the most fun part of the process, but I know it’s very important.
Because life isn’t always clear cut, the motives behind our actions don’t always make sense. But stories need to follow a logical path. What sorts of decisions have you had to make about “muddy” historical figures or events in order for your book to work?
Exclusion and the Chinese American Story is part of a series called Race to the Truth, which tells American history from the perspectives of people whose stories have often been overlooked in our broader telling of history. One of the missions of the series is to not shy away from more difficult histories, and so I was often writing about events that can be quite painful. At the same time, the book is for a middle grades audience, so I had to make decisions about the level of detail to get into. I wanted to be honest, but I also didn’t have to get into all the gory details. The best decision I made was to emphasize the flip side of difficult histories. That is to say: Any time we encounter stories of prejudice or oppression, we will also find stories of people who resisted, who worked together, and who did whatever they could to make things better for their communities. This part of the story was very important to give the reader a sense of hope and a sense of agency. One of my favorite stories in the book is that of Mabel Ping-Hua Lee, a Chinese American teenager who advocated for women’s rights to vote. It felt important to share with young readers the story of another young person who saw something she thought was wrong in the world, and did something about it.
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Dr. Sarah-SoonLing Blackburn is an educator, speaker and professional learning facilitator. She was born in Bangkok, Thailand into a mixed-race Malaysian Chinese and white American family. A classic “third culture kid,” she grew up moving between various East and Southeast Asian countries and the Washington DC area. Sarah moved to the Deep South in 2009, and she has now lived there longer than anywhere else. Her experiences first as a classroom teacher and then as a teacher educator inform her beliefs about the role that education can and must play in the realization of social justice. She owes very much to her ancestors.
Sarah spent most of her years in the classroom teaching third and fourth grade. As a professional trainer, Sarah’s areas of focus have included workplace cultures, leadership skills, and diversity, equity and inclusion. Sarah has an M.A. in Social Justice and Education from University College London’s Institute of Education. Her doctoral research at Johns Hopkins University explored strategies for retaining rural educators, and her Ed.D. specialization was Instructional Design in Online Teaching and Learning. She is based out of Oxford, Mississippi.