137: Research in the Writing Process

 

At least some research is required for most writers when working on their book, but it can be hard to balance research with brainstorming, drafting, outlining, and editing. Learn my tips for making the research process more effective.

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RESEARCH IN THE WRITING PROCESS

HHi, Friends, welcome back to your big creative life. Thank you for being here. It is hot as hell here in South Carolina. As I'm recording this. I'm just like, I don't know it. The humidity. It's gross out this morning. I walked outside to take Audrey from the house to the car. And it was like stepping outside into sauna like it was it was insane. And I checked the temperature. And I don't remember what the temperature was. But I looked at the humidity. The humidity was at 4%. And the dew point was 77. Like it's gross out. And normally I feel like August in and in. I'm in Charleston, South Carolina, at least in Charleston. August is the worst but it's been the summer so far has just been really gross. I feel like a lot of other places in the US have had a really terrible heatwave this year, the summer already also I mean, global warming man, this is just like gonna get more common.

 

 It's rough. Anyways, off the topic of the weather. I want to talk about research in the writing process. This is a question that I got. In June for our June q&a episode, someone submitted a question about research. And I wanted to talk about this because this is also something that's come up in the novel jumpstart group, which was my program to help writers with the first 50 pages of their novels. And, you know, doing research. When I say research, yes, sometimes that means like you're writing historical fiction, and you have to understand the time period that you're writing about.

 

But it can also be I don't know, you're writing a contemporary romance. And you have to research, okay, this town that this character goes to visit, what is this, like, if you've never been there, you're going to have to do some research to figure that out, or whatever it is. So it can be like heavy duty research where you need to spend hours and hours really understanding something, or it can be research where you just have to learn a few small things in order to make your book better, and more authentic, whatever that means.

 

So in this episode, I want to talk about, let me see how many tips I have for you.... six, I have six things to present to you about doing research, organizing, research, just all of that. The first thing that I think is so so essential is to separate writing time. And research time. If you know me, you know that I talk all the time about separating writing and editing. The way that I suggest new writers approach the writing process is to focus on getting the first draft out, don't stop to edit as you go. And it's kind of a similar thing with research. Like I really believe that it works best and you can be most efficient. When you separate the writing time and the research time. If you are doing writing sprints, you know that a writing sprint is you set a timer for 20 minutes, 30 minutes, whatever length of time.

 

And while that timer is running, you're only writing that is all you're doing. You're not editing, you're not researching, you're not brainstorming, you're just getting the words on the page as quickly as you possibly can. So already, if you think about what a writing sprint is, there's no room for research in a true writing sprint. What this comes down to is the fact that we as humans, I'm including myself in this, we're not great multitaskers we think that we are some of us, but they've done study after study that shows that we just get distracted, we're not as efficient or effective. And whenever we're doing is we could be if we just focused on doing that single task.

 

So what you could do, which is kind of the second tip here that I that I want to present to you is is a similar thing to a writing sprint. I mean, you can call it a research sprint, or you can call it just a research block, I guess why don't we just call it a research sprint. I mean, it's basically the same thing. Except with a research sprint. There's not the focus on getting it out as quickly as possible. Like you're not like speed researching. But you can also set a time set aside let's say 30 minutes. Let's say that you you're like I know I need to do some research. There's some things that I need to look into some answers that I need to get some that that timer for 30 minutes. And when that timer is running, you're only researching this is not also the time to be outlining your book or editing your book or doing character profiles or writing, this is purely research time. Again, just splitting it up. And that also having that dedicated research time is really, really going to help.

 

Because it can be very easy to get pulled into something that you find that is interesting. And all of a sudden you look at the clock and realize that three hours have gone by and you've like just researched one little thing that really doesn't even matter in your story. So this brings me to my next tip, which is more about doing this, about how to how to do this, when you've decided that you're going to separate your research and your writing time. And you're going to do a writing sprint, decide what needs to be researched before you write, and then decide what can wait until after the first draft is done. This is essential for you to make the most of the time that you spend researching. And here's the difference.

 

If you are writing historical fiction, and it is a time period that you are not familiar with, you haven't lived through maybe a geographic location that you have not lived in, you're going to have to do some research to understand the dynamics at play in this society in this geographic location in this time period, there's a lot that might play into that. So that's going to effect that's going to affect the plot of your story. Like in that case, the plot and the history like those are so linked together so closely, that you have to do research before you start writing. I mean, so you don't have to I shouldn't say that. But it's going to be difficult. And you might have to change large sections of your plot. If you just like write a book and not in you haven't done any research. If you do the research later, you might realize wait a second, the way that I structured this and the decisions that my characters made, like none of this makes sense for the time period. So that's why I say that.

 

On the other hand, if you are just researching minor things for your book that don't impact the plot a whole lot, then those can wait until after the first draft is done. I'm gonna give you two examples for writing a thriller of both of these. So one detail that I knew could be left until the end, was the average prison sentence for a particular person in the book, who did a particular crime in the state of Georgia. What the putting, considering all these other factors about this character, what what kind of prison sentence would we be looking at? Would it be realistic for this character to spend three years in prison? Would it be realistic for this character to spend 15 years in prison, I had no idea. So that was something I needed to look at it didn't the person not sentenced at the end of the book. So it doesn't matter to the plot how long they were in prison.

 

But I just put a little, what I did is I put a comment in the manuscript, and I put a little asterix next to it and said, check to see prison sentence. That way, when I was going through and I was writing the first draft, I didn't have to stop writing, go to Google, look at whatever to try to figure this out. I was just like, Okay, put a pin in this. I'll come back to it later. Because it didn't impact the plot, right?

 

It was just something that happened at the end, I could just like do a CTRL F for that input in later once I found out what a good amount of time would be for this person to be in prison. Something more major though, that I did have to research. I wanted a I wanted one character to drug another character, or attempt to drug another character with something. And just from telling just from telling you all these examples, I'm sure you can imagine when Google searches search history is like kind of bonkers.

 

But I had to look up drugs that you could use to like poison someone someone with or to knock them out or like roofie them I had to I had to do research into that. Because of I wanted to see what this person thought the effects would be how they would be behaving and how long they would be knocked out. And all of those little details really mattered in the scope of this big scene. So that was something I wanted to get clear on first. It wasn't something I felt like I could go back and add later. Like I wanted to be clear on what this person's plan was where they got this substance, what they how they put it into this person's food or drink.

 

I needed to be clear on all of those pieces of it and I felt like there was just a touched a lot of things in these in this big scene and actually a scene later where this person was explained anything what happened? So that's an example of something where I knew I had to research that before I wrote that scene. So yeah, just just figure out what needs to be researched beforehand, and what can wait till later.

 

Next up is kinda sounds like the same thing. But it's not really and it's to prioritize. So let's say that you've got your list of things that you need to research before writing. Or if you're halfway through writing your book, and you realize that you need to do some research. This can be things that you need to research before you continue writing your book, if you've already started.

 

This can be this can look like prioritizing an order of importance of what takes up the most page time in your book, what has the biggest impact on the plot? What is going to effect effects my characters the most like just prioritize what's essential, so that when you set aside time to research, you know what you're looking for. And you can focus on the order of importance and have a plan together. So you're not just like, well, I need to look at the 1960s in America, in my research, like that is so general, what does that mean? Specifically? What are you hoping to learn? What do you need to research and prioritize it that way?

 

Next step is to decide on an organizational strategy. And I'm not going to get too in the weeds with this, because to be honest, I don't really have a huge organizational strategy that I can share with you. My organizational strategy when I'm writing is, I just have a separate document that's like a just dump of all kinds of stuff about the book, it has any outlining that I've done character information.

 

And then any research that I've done, so like the stuff about the drug that I mentioned, the poison, like I put all that in there. And yeah, that's just like where everything goes. So I have one master document. I know that something like Scrivener, I think I've heard that it has research capabilities, where you can organize things. And if you're someone who loves the organization, part of this and really wants to get nitty gritty with it, you can. But what I want to caution you about is getting so fixated on organizing your research that you don't like either do the research, or you don't actually write or brainstorm or outline or whatever. Because that can be easy to get distracted with all that stuff like color coding things, and making tabs and whatever. And really, the research is to support the story. That's the purpose of it.

 

So you can decide how you want to organize things. If you just want to have like a bookmark tab on your Google Chrome that contains links to all of the pages of stuff that you think is essential. If you want to write notes to yourself, like outline things in a notebook, and you have just like a research notebook, you can do that. And all of this kind of hints that well, a minute ago, I just hinted at my next tip, my last tip, which is to recognize when enough is enough. This requires self awareness. And it requires cutting yourself off if you are one of those people who does really love the research.

 

When I was researching my, for my first book, which is women's fiction, one of the characters for this book was a young woman who was in her 20s. And there was a scene that she was very close to her grandmother who passed away. And there was a scene where she was looking for information about her grandmother. And she went to the library and went on their search engine, they had access to this newspaper archives for the law, she looked, her family was through Louisville.

 

And so she looked at the local paper and I had like a sample, I think I included the full text of an article that reported something about her grandmother. And I wanted to make that article sound real, I wanted to model it off a real article that appeared in a paper around that time. So I went on the archives of this newspaper, and looked for articles that were I don't know what year it was, it was like 1950 something and just looked at a bunch of different articles to kind of get an idea of the tone. And something really interesting that they would do back then is they would often refer to women by their husbands name.

 

So it would be like Mrs. John Smith hosted a party at her, you know, so like, those are the kinds of little things that I had to get right in this article in order to make it feel authentic. But it was so interesting to me looking at these paper, and it was it was like images of paper so I could see the ads from the time I could see how just how different it was they would report on parties and like the social stuff. It was so fascinating, and I easily could have spent weeks just looking at that. But really, all I needed is just some ideas of sample articles from that time to make sure that this one article I wrote sounded legit, really.

 

So I had to know when to cut myself off and be like, okay, yes, this is fascinating I, if I have spare time, and I really want to come back to this sure, but like, I need to get back to the writing now. So this requires some self awareness and he will understanding when enough is enough. And with people who are doing a lot of research, it can be tempting to feel like you need to do all of this research to be prepared before you can start writing. It can be easy to use research as an excuse, to not write or to stop writing, and not pick it back up again.

 

So just make sure you know, do a gut check, really check in with yourself and be honest about if you feel like that's happening to you. And if that is the best thing that I can tell you to do is to put the research down, figure out what's essential for you to know before you dive back into the book, and then really do what you can to get yourself to get back into the story and focus on the writing part of it. Because yes, research is super fun. I love history. I absolutely love it. And so it's it's something that's so interesting to me.

 

And again, I could easily go down a wormhole even for this lot for this last book, the one that's about to go back on submission, it deals with sororities. And so part of my research I mean, I'm putting research in quotes is like, oh, I should look at Alabama, like Rushtok like the Tiktok to kind of was like, okay, Katie, like, you're scrolling Tik Tok is not really research. And that doesn't actually play a part in my book, like it's mentioned offhand. But it's not really it wasn't really research that I needed to do. So anyways, if you have to do research for your book, good luck. I hope this is helpful so that you can can really remember that the research is supporting the writing. And get back into it if you need that push to put the research down and get back into it. But have fun because researching is fun as well. All right, I will see you all next week. Thank you so much for listening.

Katie Wolf