The Secret Life of Lobsters - Stalking the American Lobster, lobster biology and behavior

Trevor Corson describes the work behind THE SECRET LIFE OF LOBSTERS.

THE SECRET LIFE OF LOBSTERS had its origin in an article I wrote for The Atlantic Monthly magazine about Maine's lobster fishery, called Stalking the American Lobster. As I interviewed lobster fishermen and lobster scientists, watched them work on land and on the water, and visited zoology libraries to study technical papers on lobster biology and behavior, it quickly became apparent that I could write an entire book on the subject. The human characters and their unusual stories were just the beginning; I wouldn't have guessed it was possible, but the lobsters themselves turned out to be captivating characters as well.

As the book took shape, I faced a number of challenges as a writer. Like the magazine article, the book was nonfiction. Everything I wrote in THE SECRET LIFE OF LOBSTERS had to be an accurate reflection of actual events, to the best of my ability as a researcher and writer. But as any trial lawyer knows, reconstructing reality -- what actually happened -- is a surprisingly difficult proposition, even with a subject as seemingly innocuous as lobster fishing and science. Moreover, I wanted to write a book that was entertaining; I wanted to draw readers into the real lives of my characters in the way that a novelist draws readers into the fictitious lives of his or her made-up characters. Among writers there is a term for this sort of writing: "literary journalism" or "narrative nonfiction." Writers of narrative nonfiction produce entire textbooks, and attend professional conferences, to deal with exactly the challenge I faced: how to reconstruct reality and at the same time tell an entertaining story.

Many of the events that I describe in the book, particularly those that occurred during the time I was conducting my research, I witnessed first-hand. I spent many months following several lobster fishermen and several lobster scientists while they went about their business: setting and hauling traps, repairing traps and boats, operating underwater robots and cameras, digging through seaweed and mud, tagging thousands of baby lobsters, and diving in submarines to the ocean floor. In addition, I observed my characters in other settings: attending meetings, socializing and eating meals, interacting with their families and friends, and so on. During these events, as a first-hand witness I took notes about what happened. I referred to those notes and my own recollections, as well as the recollections of others, when I was later reconstructing these events for the book.

However, there were also events and scenes that I had not witnessed myself, particularly those that had occurred in the past -- a problem that every journalist faces. To reconstruct those events accurately, I conducted innumerable interviews, often asking the same people the same questions several times over in different ways and at different times to test their memories, and then testing those people's memories against the memories of others. I also dug up documentary evidence of past events whenever I could -- in the form of newspaper clippings, research reports, historical accounts, transcripts, maps, photographs, or videotapes (and in a few cases even gravestone inscriptions) -- to flesh out the details of scenes and as an additional check on what people remembered.

When I was researching the book, there were a few cases -- and this starts to get a bit arcane -- where I wasn't able to elicit a specific recollection about a particular event at all. My source remembered that the event had happened, but recalled no details. If my aim was to illustrate a typical event, rather than to relate the details of a specific historical occurrence, then I asked my source to reconstruct what such an event had probably been like, even if he or she didn't remember the specifics of a particular day. I used this technique sparingly. Some writers might consider even its occasional use to be pushing the boundaries of acceptable nonfiction practice, but my own judgment was that it was fair to use for certain limited purposes. At any rate, these are the sort of professional questions that journalists debate, and should debate -- especially after the recent scandals involving Jack Kelley at USA Today, Jayson Blair at The New York Times, and Stephen Glass at The New Republic, in which writers calling themselves journalists passed fiction off as fact.

A writer should also be clear about where he got his information. Originally I wanted to include an extensive bibliography in THE SECRET LIFE OF LOBSTERS, but my publisher felt that listing all of my textual references -- there were more than 150 entries -- would be overkill in a popular book intended primarily for the layman, especially considering that the core of my source material was interviews. However, if you are interested in viewing the full bibliography of textual references that I employed in writing THE SECRET LIFE OF LOBSTERS, you can do so here.

Even with the most painstaking efforts to research and report accurately, no writer can hope to get every last detail right. After THE SECRET LIFE OF LOBSTERS was published, a number of readers contacted me to suggest a variety of corrections, most of them regarding spelling and typos, but some addressing other issues. For example, in describing a particular scuba dive, I'd used a description that a scientist had given me of water that was so cold it was "near zero." The scientist was using Celsius degrees instead of Fahrenheit, but I failed to make that clear -- in my description, the scientist would have been swimming inside a block of ice. Elsewhere, I referred to a lighthouse on Mt. Desert Rock in Maine as the "easternmost" lighthouse in the United States. That came as news to the residents of Lubec, Maine, whose lighthouse at West Quoddy Head is spitting distance from the Canadian border. In one case, a reader pointed out that my depiction of a particular event might have been misleading. Specifically, in the book a lobsterman is described as having trouble obtaining from government employees a copy of something called the Botsford Report -- a key scientific assessment of the lobster fishery. The depiction of the lobsterman's difficulty obtaining the full report is accurate and was corroborated, but I neglected to balance that depiction by also noting that the findings of the report had been presented at a public meeting sometime earlier, a fact of which I had not been aware. Thanks to the careful readers to who took the time to contact me, these corrections will all be included in the paperback edition of THE SECRET LIFE OF LOBSTERS, due out in the spring of 2005.