Research: You have to love it...
Unless you are an authority on a certain subject, you may have to do a lot of research to write a story or article. Articles, of course, are usually nothing but facts but fiction can conceivably be written without them since you can make up stuff as you go along. I think the problem with this approach, though, is that you can write a story full of nothing but fantasy and lose a reader because they have no reference points even loosely based in reality. I think that hard facts make a fictional story more real to a reader no matter what genre it is written in. Take Jurassic Park as an example; what occurred in the story is highly unlikely to ever happen but due to all the scientific facts used in the writing of it, the story certainly makes it seem like it could happen at any minute and make you believe that it is happening somewhere in our world.
In one of my stories, I relate the adventures of a time-tripping better half of the Men In Black society. In the story, Debra, our heroine, is sent back in time to deal with a pesky alien known to the masses as Jack the Ripper. Her job is to eliminate this alien because his presence caused too many disruptions in the future. The problem with this is that you cannot drop a beautiful blonde assassin, who is an expert fighter, a crack shot, and who can skewer an alien using her very non-regulation Stiletto, into the middle of the Whitechapel District of London in 1888 and not have her stick out like a strobe light in a darkened room.
So in Debra's Assignment Package, there is suitable clothing and money for the period but there was something else that I put in there as well. I thought about the time and place and realized that Debra's pattern of speech would make her stand out just as much as anything else. Jack the Ripper hunted his victims in a very poor part of London where criminals of all types roamed. His victims were poor prostitutes that sold their wares just so they could get a doss for the night. As such, most of the denizens of the Whitechapel district spoke Cockney English.
So I inserted a copy of Hanson’s Cockney-to-English Dictionary into the package and gave her a few days to learn her new language. Fortunately, Debra is as smart as she is sexy so by the time it was time to transport her to the Ripper's hunting grounds, she was proficient in the verse, so much so that the following conversation took place as she roamed the streets hoping to trap Jack into an attempt on her life before he could get to poor Polly Nichols, who was his first known victim:
"Very nice, neck down, ya know. The boat face is a problem, but then I don't 'ave to look a' it I ‘spose."
Whirling at the comment, the tawdry looking woman retorted, "'oo you talkin' 'bout, guvna? Take a butchers at this. These'll knock yer mincers out."
Debra then pulled down her neckline showing a wealth of cleavage.
"Ain't neve' said y' ain't got a bit of a body on ya; nice arse an' all. But a plain one y'are, I say. Maybe a bit o' color would dice you up."
"Ain't neve' touched the stuff, an' I ain't gonna start fer the likes of you."
"Oh I'd duck, ya right enough, you witch. But I got ta get home to the trouble 'n strife. Maybe it'll be I'd pass this way again."
"Right, you get to yer troubles, she’s got yer by the barnacle bills, she 'as. Go on, get it on 'ome, I got my bees knees to attend to."
The man gave her an angry glance, she tensed, ready to act, but he only cursed at her, pulled the knot tighter around his leather apron, and faded into the fog. Probably heading home for a warm meal and a dry bed; something Debra wished she could do at that moment.
The reference to the man's leather apron is a nod to the only real suspect the police had in this case. Not only was a mysterious stranger called Leather Apron by terrified prostitutes in the area, but a leather apron was also the usual garb of butchers in that day and age.
While I was researching Cockney I discovered that it was a code language criminals used as a way to speak openly around Coppers who supposedly did not understand it.
I think the addition of these realities into a wide-ranging science fiction story gave it more credence.
If you want to learn Cockney and translate the conversation above, here is a link to a great site that will help you: http://www.freelang.net/dictionary/docs/html_cockney_english.php
To read up on Leather Apron, go here: http://www.jack-the-ripper-walk.com/leather-apron.htm
Debra’s story is called Woman In Black and is the third installment of my time travel trilogy, In A Million Years: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07NY9LKMD/ref=tmm_other_meta_binding_title_sr?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=