The novelist needs data: Hanging out with canopy researchers to truth creative writing

An adage in the literary world states: write what you know. A successful novel must present believable characters and situations that hold a reader’s attention for several hundred pages.  As a novelist who lives on the coast of the Pacific Northwest, I can easily describe the texture of a seastar and the smell of the intertidal zone at low tide.  However, in 2005, I embarked on a novel about a topic I knew nothing about, the life of a canopy ecologist.  How was I to enter the mind of my character, a woman who studies insects at the top of 70-meter trees?  Thinking like a scientist, whose job is to ‘find out what you don’t know’, I read extensively from the scientific literature and went into the field to collect my own data with ecologists from the International Canopy Network. I observed researchers’ activities from the ground, took field notes and photographs, recorded interviews, and climbed trees. As a result, I gained a level of experience, knowledge, and empathy from which to translate elements of the real world of canopy ecology to the general public as readers:  how to ascend a tree on a rope, the role of lichens to rainforest nitrogen budgets, the contribution of moss mats to biodiversity conservation, and the feel of sap on the fingers.  This interdisciplinary exchange proved to be mutually beneficial: the novelist got her data, and the scientist received a unique opportunity for ecological outreach.