Colleen McCullough discusses the importance of research, 2008

Transcript of sound recording

No matter what you write, it has to be well researched. Even if the amount of research, for want of a better phrase, is very humble. When you aspire to write an historical treatise, be it a novel or a biography or a history, then of course you are saddling yourself with an immense amount of research that has to not only embrace modern experts in the field, but has to go back to the original source material.

In the case of my Roman books, I had to go back to Plutarch and Virgil and Caesar and Cicero and literally hundreds of others as well as reading the modern giants like Theodore Mommsen and Sir Ronald Syme. You're sentencing yourself to years and years of research with that. But then, if that's the kind of writing that you're moved to do, then the research is a joy to do. It's not something that you plod through, groaning at the need to do so. It's something that you espouse with glee, fascination, jubilation when you discover a completely new fact that even the professional historians haven't tumbled to, and it's rewarding in itself to do that kind of research if you've got the mind for it. But if you don't have the mind for it, don't try it, because it's going to be sloppy.

The research that I did on the Roman books, I wouldn't have used more than 10 per cent of what I actually researched in the writing of the books. And what I used was what I needed to use, that simple. If it had no place in the story, then it didn't get put in. You had to be strong. So I would put in what they ate, the kind of houses they lived in from upper to lower classes. I would detail the life of a legionary or the life of a labourer on the wharves or the life of an aristocrat, and paint it in colours that enable the reader to step into that world. Beyond that you don't go, because then the books get so long and so tortuous that you lose the thrust of the plot and the identity of your characters in a plethora of historic detail. You just have to know when enough is enough.