Kurt R.A. Giambastiani

I have discovered a corollary to Parkinson’s Law. If you don’t know, Parkinson’s law is:

Work expands to fill the time available for its completion.

My discovery, which I shall call the Researcher’s Corollary to Parkinson’s Law, is:

Research material expands to exceed the time available.

In my experience, the factor by which this material expands (aka the KRAG Coefficient) ranges anywhere from 50–100%, but in theory, it’s an open-ended scale.

This new project involves a well-known mid-20th century sculptor. If you’re Mormon, this man is very well-known: Avard T. Fairbanks. Avard died back in the late ’80s, so I’m working with the family. Over the years, they have documented Avard’s experiences, recorded and transcribed the memories and tales of his life, and published texts and histories of the artwork he created through the decades. Now, with my assistance, they are exploring the idea of creating a biographical novel of their patriarch’s life.

Based on the materials they gave me, I figured the research would take about two weeks. This included reading through the short stack of documents and transcriptions, reading the books they’d published on Avard’s work, and coming up with both an outline for a book and a quote for how much my time would cost.

Research is always a big portion of any project of mine, so two weeks is a terribly short time. However, I’m not doing book level research here; I’m doing outline level research. That’s a big difference (of which I must continually remind myself, lest I spend too much time in the weeds). But, given the relatively short stack of documentation the family provided in our face-to-face meeting, it felt like a good estimate.

Then the Researcher’s Corollary kicked in. It turns out that the documents I was given were just the tip of the iceberg. The family representative has emailed me dozens of other transcriptions and documents. What was an inch-thick stack is now, literally, two reams tall, and growing.

I’m gonna blow through the KRAG Coefficient’s 100% ceiling.

It’s interesting work, though, as I knew it would be. Delving into family histories, researching people and places online, finding the little clues and filling in the small unknowns, even uncovering new details that the family didn’t know, it’s all very engaging. Nor does it hurt that Avard T. Fairbanks had an interesting life filled with travel, toil, frustrations, triumphs, love, drama, and family. As most of the material is in his own words, transcribed, I’m also getting a sense of the man himself, though admittedly there are a lot of open questions that the family will need to answer for me, if they can.

The project has some unique challenges, though. It’s not a biography; it’s a novel. The expectations for those two things are rather different. A biography is a story about a life, but a novel is a story from a life. A novel, to be a success, must have some elements to which a biography isn’t necessarily bound. Traits such as rising conflict, foreshadowing, climax, denouement, etc., a biography can be great if it has all those, but it can be successful without them. This project is a hybrid—part biography, part fictionalized narrative—so I need to achieve a balance between craft and art, truth and fiction.

Already, ideas are starting to gel, but I have so much reading ahead of me, I can’t tell which of those ideas (if any) are going to survive.

Onward.

k