How to Do Research When Writing a Novel

Failure to research when writing a novel can be harmful to your story in some situations. If you write something that is inaccurate from a historical or technical standpoint, often there are going to be readers who pick up on your mistake.

This can result in either you looking sloppy as a writer or at worse could cause a reader to stop in the middle of the story.

In this article, I'll show you ways to do research for a novel that will help you long-term.

1) First of all, take the time to brainstorm areas of your story that may require or be enhanced with research.

Obviously there are going to be things you're already familiar with from experience, but research should be done in areas you're not sure about or have little experience. This will save you a lot of time and keep your focus where you need it.

2) Internet sources are not bad, but look at several and try to stick to authoritative sources.

If you're doing a story on space travel, surf around NASA's site to get ideas about little details that could help you. If it's a historical novel, visit several sites that are geared solely for that time period. I have nothing against Wikipedia or similar sites, but often they're more of a general source and may not have fine details. Part of creating a believable story are having those fine details.

3) Take a day and spend it at the library.

I like looking at books that don't even have an ISBN. The people who know most about historical periods are often the people that lived in them. If you can get access to those kinds of resources, those will help you as well.

4) Keep everything organized in a series of notebooks or folders (computer folders are nice, too--but have a physical back-up).

The ones I do are a combination of both visual and short notes that I think are useful. With characters, it's nice to have visuals of things like clothing, hairstyles, etc. Keep everything about a character in one place so you don't have to worry about him or her having green eyes in chapter 2 and blue eyes in chapter 17.

Additional Tips:

• I base my writing style on the idea that readers are going to be smart and are going to pay attention to detail. I don't go into so much detail that it drags the story down, but choosing the right words and details helps stories a lot.
• About the only warning I have is that the one time you ignore this step is the one time it will come back on you...it's one of the Murphy's laws of writing.

Resources:

• The Writer's Library
• Web Writer Central
• The Fictional Character Development Template

Author Link:

• Patricia Gilliam's Amazon.com Author Page
  

How to Prepare to Write a Short Story

In this article, I'll share a few foundational areas that will help you in creating a short story. Preparing well will not only make a better quality story, but it makes it easier to write as well.

1) Explore Your Characters:

If you think of your favorite stories, books, and movies, almost 99% are great because they were character-driven. With fictional characters, it's helpful to create a profile including background information, motivations, and physical descriptions for continuity. You can keep this in a file folder, notebook, or a database file on your computer for handy reference.

2) Research Your Setting:

This is going to vary based on the nature of the story. A historical short story for instance can benefit from little details from the time period the story is set. Due to the attention span of the average reader, you want to balance creating a detailed environment with keeping the reader's interest (not bogging them down with so many setting details that it hinders the actual story). There is a happy medium that creates a very rich story in a short amount of pages.

3) Create a Framework for Your Plot:

Even if you don't have all the details at first, creating a framework for your story generally makes things a lot easier. With novels you have more room to explore multiple sub-plots, but short stories are generally very focused. You're usually tracking with one character or a small set of characters through the entire piece, so you need to know the character's conflict, how that conflict builds, and its resolution.

4) Revise More Than Once:

Walk away from the story for a few days, then revisit it. You will find ways to improve it several times. Eventually you will reach a point that adding or changing would actually take away from it. That's when you're really done.

Additional Tips:

• Start your planning on paper, and over time it does gets easier to do it automatically. I still use notebooks a lot just so I'll have a reference for ideas I want to use later.
• Save all of your short stories and refer back to them. I was able to take a set of short stories and three years later adapt them into a novel.

Resources:

• The Writer's Library
• Web Writer Central

Author Link:

• Patricia Gilliam's Amazon.com Author Page