Research or Not?

 I knew this writer in prison who made a big deal about researching the details of his stories which he set in his hometown of Washington,D.C.  Theodore Dreiser put the same emphasis on researching the facts of his story. I got criticized for saying I needed to finish both 'No Clean Slates" and "Chasing Ashes" back in Indiana because I needed to research what Indiana was like now rather than before my incarceration. I think I was right the more I am home and the mreo differences I find in my home state.

Then I found through The Guardian David Nicholls: Google v old-fashioned legwork - how to research a novel. Which lays out the arguments pro and con, including this paragraph which leaves me feeling justified in my choices:

Meanwhile, other writers create familiar worlds that are precisely conveyed, mappable almost, while remaining overtly fictitious; Middlemarch, Cranford, Barchester and on through Tilling, Hardborough and Ambridge. It’s an approach that works better for self-contained provincial communities than city life. A renamed shadow-London, Moscow or Rome might run the risk of seeming absurd – what would you call it? What are its landmarks, its history? How could you begin to make it up? Consequently when those provincial characters leave their fictionalised homes to travel, the real-world locations seem to materialise around them. In Great Expectations, Dickens’s London locations are characteristically precise and significant, so that Jaggers lives on the south side of Gerrard Street, Wemmick’s castle is in Walworth and Estella resides on Richmond Green, but further from the capital the specifics disappear and we enter the “marsh country”; vividly conveyed, geographically obscure, it’s enough to know that Satis House is “uptown”. A little digging places the model for that famous churchyard in real-life Cooling, Kent, but once outside London there are many fewer pins in the real-world map.