"Let me tell you a story.
'There once was a girl who liked to write stories. She also liked to get her characters into extreme circumstances. One day, she was planning to kidnap some characters. That night, she decided to try out a typical kidnapper technique: Gagging.
Curious about if movies were correct, she tied a strip of cloth through her mouth, around her head. She found that she could still easily talk. It wasn’t comfortable, but it didn’t impair her much. So she tried a different tactic.
She took more cloth out of her scrap basket, stuffed a piece in her mouth, and tied the strip around to keep it in.
That was how she discovered why a gag has that name. She couldn’t stop coughing, though the cloth made it hard to cough properly. She only lasted about five seconds with the cloth in her mouth, but her imagination extrapolated it long term, and she included those details in her book.
Months later, she informed her parents of this experiment. Her dad’s reaction was “So that’s why you wrote it that way.” A friend discovered much the same information on gagging via an internet search, prompting the girl to question her research methods. But it was already done.'
And that girl was me. Yes, I gagged myself. That’s probably the most extreme story research I’ve done. Most of the time I do a Google search, get books from the library, or ask someone I know. My research on deer hunting consisted of asking my congressman about it. My research on trials consisted of my dad making corrections to my trial scene. But my research on kidnapping techniques consisted of gagging myself in my room in the middle of the night.
For the record, I don’t recommend gagging yourself. It is extremely unpleasant, especially if you have a strong gag reflex like I do. But it does make an interesting story."
