Search Engine Fun

One of the ways that technology has changed the writing game–writers used to have to spend time in libraries paging through volumes of books, encyclopedias, and magazines to find the particular facts needed to bring verisimilitude to their work. Having just the right details could bring a story to life.

(Or you could, you know, just make everything up. That’s why they called it fiction.)

But now we have a wealth of information at our fingertips–the World Wide Web (except for the parts corrupted with propaganda, AI, and misinformation. But that’s a rant for another day.)

So writers love to trade stories on the weirdest things they’ve ever looked up on a search engine and to joke about how some of those searches, especially from the crime writers, likely land us on various and sundry watch lists at law enforcement and intelligence agencies around the world.

Which brings me to what I know has been my oddest search engine request that I’ve ever done. This past week, I typed into the search bar the words “Klan rallies” with much trepidation. What would I actually find?

I was doing research for a scene in my work-in-progress, set in 1970’s east Tennessee. It was after much of the worst of the 1960’s terror of the Klan was broken, but pockets of Kluckers were still active in some communities. So I imagined my protagonists stumbling into a rally by accident.

Almost immediately I found a press account of an initiation in 2004 (yikes) in Tennessee documented in a local newspaper article indexed by the Southern Poverty and Law Center. I scanned it and figured out exactly how the scene would go down.

I tell this story to show how sometimes it takes staring into the abyss for us humans to understand how to bring justice and fairness to our worlds. I took information about a dark spot in America’s history and transmuted it into a scene that says something about how ordinary people cope in the face of this kind of evil. And sometimes that means us writers must do things that make us uncomfortable for our art.

Including looking up weird topics on the internet.

Happy writing!