You’ll find my story “Duck and Cover” in this week’s Binyan. While I lived through the tail-end of the Cold War, I’m not old enough to have survived the Cuban Missile Crisis, the setting for my story. In order to get details about how teens reacted to the situation, I conducted brief email interviews of a number of subjects who were old enough to remember the events.
The responses I received were fascinating, and I used many of the anecdotes my interviewees shared as I depicted how different characters reacted to the crisis. Reading the completed story, I feel those interviews (thank you to anyone who helped me!) really contributed to the realism of the story.
Has anyone out there conducted surveys or interviews as research for a fictional work? Tell us about the experience in the comments below.
