Every author knows the moment. It’s midnight, you’re deep in a chapter, and your protagonist needs to dispose of a troublesome witness, or perhaps calculate the exact trajectory of an arrow fired from a third-storey window in 1790 London. You open a new tab, type in the most specific, appalling question imaginable, and realise two things: first, that you desperately need the answer, and second, that your personal search history now looks like the evidence file for a serious, highly organised crime syndicate.
We all live with the chilling certainty that there is an algorithm somewhere quietly flagging our digital activity. Our search history isn’t a record of curiosity; it’s proof that we are, at best, unstable, and at worst, actively planning a baroque, geographically complex felony.
The Catalogue of Incrimination
The true genius, and the true threat, of a writer’s search history lies in its chaotic detail. It’s not the specific keywords that alarm the authorities; it’s the sheer volume of niche, terrifying questions we ask. Here is just a small sample of the incriminating evidence I’ve accrued over the last few months:
★ What happens to a body if it’s left submerged in peat bog for six months?
★ Can you disable the electric fence on a high-security dairy farm using only a potato and a paperclip?
★ Best way to fake an alibi for a Tuesday afternoon between 2:00 pm and 4:30 pm.
★ How much blood loss is required before unconsciousness but not death? (Followed immediately by: “Do emergency services charge for call-outs in rural Scotland?”)
★ The tensile strength of nautical rope (just in case) and the average price of a pint of milk in 1993.
★ Quickest way to establish a legitimate business using illicit funds, preferably one involving antique clocks or specialist birdseed.
The algorithm sees a criminal mastermind meticulously preparing; it entirely misses the fact that the “permafrost” query was followed by twenty minutes of watching videos of puffins. The line between careful research and genuine psychopathy is frighteningly thin.
The Saving Grace: Historical and Mundane Details
What slightly redeems us is the occasional, desperate leap into the painfully mundane details that betray the fact we are simply trying to build a believable world. We may be plotting a fictional war, but we still need to know the correct shade of paint for a specific period car or the exact name of a Victorian surgical instrument.
These are the moments when we, the writers, briefly resurface from our immersion in fictional brutality to check a small, utterly harmless fact. They are our tiny, desperate plea to the NSA: “I’m mostly harmless, I just needed to know the weight of a gold sovereign.”
The search history of a writer is messy, terrifying, and profoundly funny. It is the unedited, uncensored record of a mind attempting to construct order from chaos, one deeply incriminating search query at a time. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to check the exact tensile strength of nautical rope. For research, obviously.
A. R. Hurst 