Notes On Researching a Story

How accurate do you need to be? Ask yourself this first because it's going to be your guidepost from here on out. Of course, you already know how long you'd like your story to be, and of course that may change. It will take another post, or several posts even, to break down how you can determine if you need to go shorter or longer with a story. As for now, make sure you're keeping an eye on whether it's working at its current length.

After you decide the level of accuracy your story requires, next ask yourself what you need to know? You, the writer. What is absolutely essential to know in order for you to write your story? It's probably less than you think, or more specifically it's probably already in your head.

If you're writing historical fiction then obviously a different level of research is needed, but that could also depend on what kind of historical fiction you're writing.

Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter by  Seth Grahame-Smith doesn't need to be as deeply researched as Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel. Do you need to know the period-accurate names for multiple styles of carriages/buggies? Well, maybe, but honestly, probably not.

Your story is most likely not dependent on conveying the exact names of carriages, but if it is you'll know. Story, as defined by a lot of people, is a causal sequence of events: this happens, so this happens, but then this happens, and so this happens. That breaks down further into, you guessed it, a beginning, middle, and end. 

Research is very rarely the thing that will produce one of those causal events.

Finally, what does the reader need to know? My interview with Tommy Dean greatly helped me pull this concept into perspective. Readers tend, generally, to react to stories relationally, which is to say based on associations between themselves and the story/characters, but also to the characters' relationships with their world and the people in it.

I think research is at its most effective when it deepens my understanding of the story and the characters, but doesn't get in the way of the reader accomplishing the same. That's not always easy to do. One way I work to make it happen, however, is to keep long documents of research that can include anything from dates (birthdays, death days, inaugurations, etc.) to the definitions of words important to my themes.

I also tend to keep a document called "STREAM" where I can let any thought(s) unspool onto the page, dating each entry so I can later establish some sort of timeline for my madness. The document I keep right next to "STREAM" is called "RESEARCH," which is much more organized.

There is no better way to ensure your research is balanced between early drafts and the published story than editing. The best editing is always done by someone other than you. More on that later!