The Write Stuff - Writing Tips To Help You Complete Your Book. Tip #6 – Be a Research Engine

In the film Throw Momma From the Train, Billy Crystal is an author who has grudgingly turned to teaching to make ends meet. In an early scene, we see one student read this extract from her current work where the setting is a submarine. “‘Dive, dive,’ yelled the captain through the thing. So the man who makes it dive pressed a button, or something, and it dove.”

You’re creating an imaginary world for your audience, but if it’s riddled with factual errors or comical ambiguousness then, just like reality glitching in The Matrix, the illusion will be shattered. This means you need to understand your world intimately and that means research.

I know that all you want to do is get your story out and done, that perhaps you think research can wait until you have a first draft, but that initial stage will be a far easier process if you’ve put in the time to fully understand the world in which it’s set.

Research is actually my favourite part of the writing process. But I’m the kind of person who has a voracious need to know the answers to questions that pop into my head. Every question. Just this morning I needed to know whether the French word “parler” was the etymological origin of the word Parliament, the UK chart position of the single Breaking Away, released in 1986 by singer Jaki Graham, and whether actor Ray Liotta was still alive since I’d seen him guest in a sitcom I’m currently bingeing. The answers were yes, #16, and sadly no, he’s not.

My current novels, The Mythic Series, are based upon the concept that our creative inspiration is based upon the reality of another, magical, world. But the process isn’t exact so we change details or mash them up. In the books, I pull apart details from things like mythology, language, architecture, science, and popular culture and put them back together in different ways.

I research a lot of subjects. My upcoming sixth novel in the series involved research on things like ancient gladiatorial contests, Shakespeare’s MacBeth, Winter and Spring themed deities, Tokyo stadiums, and compound words with “bear” (or homonyms of “bear”) in them. I have a character in this one who always speaks in rhymes. He’s very annoying but the research necessary to find inventive rhymes has been a blast.

We’ll always be more interested in researching subjects we’re drawn to but sometimes as authors we don’t get that luxury. When I’m stuck with a subject that’s trying (usually mathematics) I switch it up. I try different mediums. Instead of hitting the books, I find seminars online or in real life. I interview experts who can explain things to me in ways I actually understand. I do courses. I join groups. On a holiday in Paris, I walked my way from the Arc de Triomphe down the Champs-Elysées and through the Louvre, plotting the exact steps my characters would take in the events of Book Two.

If you want to write and you don’t love research, then you need to find a way to do so. Be curious. Get curious. Albert Einstein famously said ‘I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious.’ I suspect he was being more than a little modest but that thirst to know more clearly served him well. I also suspect he was someone who might have been able to actually explain mathematics to me…