How do you research your novel? How do you avoid procrastinating via research?
In this week's Quick Tips we're tackling the pre-planning journey of research.
Tip 1: Set limits, create deadlines, and use timers.
Tip 2: Understand the type of research you need. Is it traditional, freeform, or experiential? Each type has its benefits and drawbacks, so know what you're doing before you fall down that rabbit hole.
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Welcome to the Author Wheel podcast. I'm Megan Haskell, award-winning fantasy author of the Signari Chronicles and the Rise of Lilith series.
Speaker 2:
And I'm Greta Boris, usa Today bestselling author of the Mortician Murders and the soon-to-be-released Almost True Crime series. Together we are the Author Wheel. Our goal is to help you overcome your writing roadblocks so you can keep your stories rolling. Today we're gonna tackle a subject most writers have strong opinions about research. In my experience, people either love it or hate it. Hopefully today's tips will turn the haters around and give the lovers more to love.
Speaker 2:
Aw yeah, tip number one is to put limits on your research time, because you know, it's just as easy to go down the research rabbit hole as it is to avoid research altogether, especially if we're feeling a little intimidated by the blank page. Research can actually become a procrastination tool rather than a helpful tool. We subscribe to what we call the Goldilocks principle not too much, not too little, but just right. But how? How do you know what's just right? And how do you stick to that?
Speaker 2:
Well, this is back to our first tip putting limits on your research time. We suggest you use timers and or create deadlines. So decide in advance how much time you are willing to spend on a topic and how much time you think it's going to take, and also decide when you're going to tackle it. And if it is a thing where you're going to go, start Googling and you know how that can go. One link leads to another, leads to another. Put a timer on, give yourself whatever you think is feasible or reasonable, and I'm going to tell you, because we do love to tell stories on ourselves. I once wasted an entire writing day trying to find out what the color of the tables were in the visiting area of Santa Ana Main Jail. Like how incredibly stupid is that?
Speaker 1:
And yet we've all done something similar at some point. It just it happens.
Speaker 2:
I do think that it was the procrastination thing was going on. I wasn't sure what was going to happen next, and so he sat down at the blank table and for some reason I felt like I had to fill in that color instead of just saying he sat down at the table, which could have easily been done, anyway, spent a whole day. Obviously that was not something I could find the answer to. Could not find the answer, but the irony of it was much later I bumped into a friend who's in law enforcement, who was in and out of Santa Ana main jail all the time, you know, and so I said by the way, what is the color of those tables? And he thought about it. He thought about it and he goes.
Speaker 2:
Well, I don't know. I've been in that room a hundred times. I can't remember Well, so seriously, if somebody who's been in that room 100 times can't remember, it is not going to add any real factual. Boy, this book sure seems realistic to my story, right, it was just a waste of time. Yeah, so that is my story. What is your tip?
Speaker 1:
Well, so my tip is what kind of research do you need to do? Because if you had gone to visit the Santa Ana main jail, which would be a form of research which would also have wasted way too much time, so don't do that. But if you had, you would know.
Speaker 2:
I would have Right.
Speaker 1:
You are correct. But so really you do need to kind of figure out what kind of research you need to do, because those different styles will take different amounts of time. So tip number two is to plan it out. In our course Layering your Story World how to Make Fiction Feel Real, we actually outline three different types of research, and each has its pros and cons and different expectations for what you're going to get out of it.
Speaker 1:
So first off, there's traditional research, and this is really great when you know exactly what you need to learn and can go online or to the library to look it up. So facts are key. On this. It's like like I had to look up you know what was the time period at the height of the Aztec empire, how long ago was that? When you know what was the year, I didn't know that, I just looked it up online.
Speaker 1:
I also have looked up you know street names and Laguna Beach or other relatively easy factual questions that you should be able to find on the internet or again at the library. Most of this kind of research really doesn't, or shouldn't, take too much time. Setting a short timer 15 minutes, 30 minutes, maybe an hour is perfect for the traditional research that you can just answer a question, but sometimes we don't know exactly what we need to know, we just need to be inspired and so in that case, free form immersion is a better form of research and arguably, maybe this isn't really research so much as idea generation or inspiration, brain fuel as we've called it in other sections of our course and other podcasts and stuff, but it's when you don't have a specific question but you just generally need to explore a concept.
Speaker 1:
For example, I have spent hours and hours and hours watching YouTube videos on myths of the ancient world. I enjoy it, it's fun for me, it's part of just my personal interests and hobbies, but it definitely influences my stories. And if I do have, then a specific god or legend or myth, I can spend more time focusing on that to pull out the elements that I want to use in my books. But the trick here is to make sure you set boundaries around how much time you're willing to give up to do your research. This is where timers, again, really can come into play. You don't want to spend an entire day trying to figure out the color of the tables in the Santa Ana main jail, you don't? No, no, that's really not beneficial. But not to say I haven't done something similar myself, but I have. But so for me, what I? I tend to do this kind of research at lunch. I put on a YouTube video as I'm eating and kind of just let absorb the information as it is presented rather than specifically taking notes or answering questions. And then the third and final kind of research is experiential, and that's when you take a class or you do an activity to learn what it feels like. This is when you want the sensory detail of the situation, you experience it.
Speaker 1:
So for my very first still and always unpublished novel, I decided that the pack of werewolves that I was writing about were going to be colorado miners, and why I decided that I now probably really couldn't say, but it seemed to make sense at the time, and so they. They had immigrated from the old country and they lived in the mountains with their. Their strength and survival abilities had let them amass a huge fortune in gold and silver back in the heyday of the Colorado frontier. It's kind of a cool concept, actually. Kind of is actually no, but the story was not well written, so whatever, anyway, not going to be published, maybe someday I'll go back to it I digress. So the cool thing was, though. So I was able to feel the cold and the damp and experience the dark and see those old tools that they would have used. So it was a really cool experience that lent itself well to the story that I was writing.
Speaker 1:
But obviously I had to take a trip to Colorado, where I don't live, and the tour itself was, you know, a few hours long. We had to drive out there. All this, all of that stuff. It was actually part of the train in the mountains there. So so it did take more time, more money, more effort, but I thought it was worth it because it was, it gave me all that sensory detail and that time limit was already built in because it was, you know, just that one trip and just the one day that we did the mind tour. So those are really the kind of the three main ways of doing research and you know you got to figure out what's going to be best for your story that you're writing now, yes, that's a very good trip.
Speaker 2:
Your story that you're writing now, yes, that's a very good trip. And you know, sometimes, just as a little adjunct to what you just said, when you do experiential type research, you know, maybe that didn't show up in that book, but I bet you've used caves or that kind of feeling of the dark, cold underworld thing in some of your other books, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:
For some reason I can't figure out why caves show up. A lot of my books have caves in them.
Speaker 2:
They're just creepy.
Speaker 1:
I know I have them too. They're fun.
Speaker 2:
Yeah they're good.
Speaker 2:
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