Whether you are writing fiction, or nonfiction, research is going to be key.  What and how you need to research depends on your subject matter or genre. 

For instance, I write space opera that is a love letter to soap opera.  This is a far cry from hard science fiction, where the focus is on accuracy of scientific details.  I spent more time researching the tropes of telenovelas, and the history of celebrity chefs, and less time researching star ship engines.  That’s not to say that I spent no time researching the science.  I still needed it to sound plausible, even if I wasn’t going into detail about scientific principles.

On the other hand, my Bean to Bar Mysteries are set in the real world.  In the eighth book, my characters – who are from Texas – get invited to go to Japan.  Because I sometimes lecture aboard cruise ships, I was able to visit the part of Tokyo where the book takes place.  I was able to describe the feel of the streets, the food, and the friendliness of the people from a first-hand perspective.

It is easy to go deep into the research rabbit hole.  This is fine – as long as you emerge from it ready to complete your writing project.  It can be too easy to spend all your time researching and constructing a Story Bible instead of writing.  I get it.  Writing is hard, especially if you don’t know where you are going with the structure of your book, script or story.  But if you don’t actually sit down and write, you won’t have anything you can polish and share with readers.

You will probably research more facts and context than should actually wind up in your manuscript.  You only need to include facts that are relevant to the character’s situation.  You may have spent several hours researching the fabrics and construction of ball gowns in the 1860s.  That’s great, but all that matters to the reader is what that gown looks like when the character moves, and how hard it is to sit down in when she’s waiting anxiously to be asked by someone – anyone – to dance.  If course, if poor construction causes her to rip a seam, you’ve managed to work in a bit more of your research without making it obvious. 

If you’re writing nonfiction, you have a bit more leeway to just share facts.  Of course, it is easy to overwhelm your readers with so much information that they cannot determine what is important.  Give someone too much to try to remember, and they will likely retain little of it.  We’ve all had the experience of re-reading pages in textbooks because the dense level of information made it difficult to decipher.  Your brain just slides over it, and you find yourself three pages later, wondering what just happened.

To create memorable prose, be it fiction or nonfiction, you have to appeal to your readers in a sensory fashion.  It’s all in the details.  What does it smell like in a particular scene set in a far-flung city?  Can you describe the maker’s mark on the watch that is your story’s McGuffin?  What kind of clothing did your non-fiction subject have on when you interviewed him?  These things can be vivid and visceral, and will go a long way to making a character or interview subject iconic in your reader’s mind, or to sell your setting as real.

Does Story Ever Trump Accuracy?

Sometimes, the real facts of an account are boring.  Or the way something works just doesn’t mesh with the story you want to tell.  That’s when you have to make a choice. 

Sometimes, the right choice is to take the cinematic view.  Lasers in space don’t really go Pew! Pew! Pew! But in A New Hope, it helps get across what is really happening, and the drama of the stakes.  Yet, in Alien, the tagline is, “In space, no one can hear you scream.”  The lack of sound helps build the creepy atmosphere, preparing the audience for jump scares.  Playing into real-world physics makes the story more convincing, as we subconsciously relate and are like, “Yeah, that’s how things really work.”

You are likely to alienate some readers when you choose to go for story over accuracy, so make sure you are really getting enough of a bonus as far as stakes and drama to offset this.  If you decide it’s worth it, play off the change you’ve made to history or physics as a feature of your story world, so that it feels less like a mistake.  And be consistent with it.

One place where you will usually be forgiven your adaptations is dialogue.  If you’re writing something set in the Middle Ages, the way the characters would realistically speak in English would be difficult for the average reader to decipher.  To some degree, you have to modernize the dialogue.  Just be careful when including cliches and terms that would have not have been in use at the time, references to modern inventions, or names that are anachronistic.  The reader perception here can sometimes outweigh historical fact, as exemplified by the Tiffany Paradox, which examines the fact that Tiffany was a legit name in the Middle Ages, but readers perceive it as modern, so if you name your character Lady Tiffany, folks are inclined to giggle, and consider it an error.

Double Check Facts – Even if You Think You Know

Readers of historicals and historical romance often have a favorite time period to read about.  They KNOW the time period, and may have researched details of it, outside of the fiction they read.  They will notice inaccuracies and may even post irritation in their reviews.  If there are enough inaccuracies, they probably won’t read that author’s future books.

Double check the details, especially when it comes to dates.  I’ve written a couple of (unpublished) time travel pieces, and had beta readers nit pick details I thought I knew.  I had a character use an egg timer as a countdown clock, only to have multiple people note that egg timers weren’t invented until five years after the book was set.  Fashion could also change quickly.  I wound up playing that off as a joke in the revision, where the young protagonist had talked her father into buying a crinoline cage (which created a specific silhouette for dresses), and now that it has gone out of fashion, he’s threatening not to buy her anything new unless she wears it.  She refuses, of course.  (Yeah – I was a few years off when I had written the original scene into the manuscript.)

It’s not just history that you need to get right.  Whatever occupation your character has, whatever hobbies she pursues, some of your readers will have that same occupation or interest.  It’s important to get specialized jargon, techniques and culture right.  Otherwise, you’re going to grate a portion of readers the wrong way, and they probably won’t hesitate to rant about it on Goodreads – or at least to their friends.  You want positive word of mouth about your book, so do your best to connect with someone in that field who you can interview.  One of the best compliments I got about my Bean to Bar Mysteries was from Sander Wolf, the guy behind dallaschocolate.org, who said that reading my books, he couldn’t believe they were written by someone who hadn’t worked as a chocolate maker.  But I had spent time with chocolate makers, trapsed through cacao farms, taken a hands-on-chocolate making class, and consulted with a chocolate maker on the way I was laying out Felicity’s fictional shop and microfactory.

I have read a few novels where chocolate making, or the art of chocolatiering appears, and every time something impossible happens, it throws me out of the story.  The biggest one: It takes 3 – 4 days to conch chocolate.  But many writers seem to conflate chocolate making with baking and have things involving chocolate take place in impossibly short amounts of time.  It might not bug some readers – but the ones that are thrown may find it painful to read those scenes.

Double – maybe even triple – check everything you’re including in your manuscript that you picked up from watching fictional movies or books in your genre.  It can feel like you really know a place, time period, or process simply because you love the genre and have watched or read widely.  But you never know when the research on-screen is shoddy, or shifted to appeal to a cinematic audience.  Don’t repeat others mistakes, when we have so many resources at hand to double-check our presumptions against.

Make Friends with a Librarian

I used to work the reference desk at the UT Arlington library.  (I was a library assistant, working my way through library school, getting on-the-job training.)  I always loved the challenge of helping someone research deeply into a project.  But there would sometimes come a point when it was clear the patron needed more detailed information, and we would call one of the subject librarians.  The depth of knowledge in librarians who specialized in science, history or art was astounding.  Librarians – and other subject experts – love sharing what they know.

It is easier to get information from a librarian or subject expert if you have already done some of the research ahead of time.  Otherwise, the librarian will spend most of the time with you covering basics.  You will never get to the research question that you couldn’t easily look up the question to.  Sometimes you don’t know what you don’t know, and you would never think to ask.  But a helpful professional can see your interest and help you build on basic knowledge.

Don’t forget about museums.  They often have hands-on exhibits, or artifacts that you can examine for details that will enliven your story or book.  We visited a samurai museum in Dallas and noticed much of the armor on display features glorious mustaches attached to the metal.  We found out this was because many of the guys were so young they couldn’t actually grow a mustache, and they wanted to look older.  Who knew?  We have visited a sea salt evaporation facility, an offshore rig museum, a sushi museum, and a museum dedicated to okonomiyaki sauce.  And that’s just been in the last couple of years.    

Do Interviews

Likewise, with interviews, it is much easier to ask a subject relevant questions if you already know something about her background and preferences.  Look at the subject’s website and social media.  This may give you enough information to basically write your article or book, using the interview to draw out stories the subject may not have previously shared or quotes to add color to your piece.

If you are interviewing someone who hasn’t been interviewed before, and who doesn’t have much information publicly available, you should still make a list of relevant questions,  You can still do some research about the subject’s occupation, geographical location, or other relevant statistics in order to come up with more focused questions.

If you are writing fiction, you can do character interviews.  This means sitting down and writing an imaginary blank room where you can take your characters and “talk” to them.  Asking characters visceral, emotional questions and then writing out the answers in the characters’ POV and voice can often be just as revealing and unexpected as interviewing a live subject.

Go There.  And if You Can’t – Visit Virtually.

If you are writing about a real-world location, nothing beats visiting it.  Even if your setting is fictional, but is inspired by a certain type of terrain, visiting the most accessible equivalent can help ground you when you write.  After all, you have a bank of details to draw from.

When I was writing Free Chocolate, I had visited rainforest in several countries, but never in Brazil, where parts of the first book are set.  The ticket to São Paulo was too pricy, especially for an unpublished author, so I drew on the details I had observed in other places, and I supplemented it by watching YouTube documentaries set in the region I was describing.  I read about the place, looked at maps, did everything I could to make it accurate.  My editor at Angry Robot was from Brazil, and he said the book brought him back home.

I wanted the research form my next project to be easier, which is part of the reason I set the Bean to Bar Mysteries in Galveston (even though this is a challenging place to make chocolate – oh, the humidity!).  I grew up in Southeast Texas, a ferry ride across to the island.  I already knew what the Strand looked like, and how it felt to stand on the seawall looking down at the beach.  I’m definitely not BOI (born on the island), but I spent summers there as a kid, day-tripping to the beaches.  I’d become fascinated with Galveston history years before, and I had read several books on the subject, including a biography of Issac Cline which discussed the Great Hurricane.  I’ve been through hurricane evacuations and sat watching the weather, with its ominous pull.  So when I sat down to write Grand Openings Can Be Murder, I was pulling on a bank of knowledge that made the setting real and convincing.  Still, I had to do research.  I’d seen the grand Victorian houses on the island from the outside, and been inside a couple of them, but I had to learn what goes into restoring one.  (As Felicity’s aunt is doing in the first book.)  I’d walked down the Strand, but never looked into the logistics of where the business owners’ had to park their cars.  (After all, parking there is extremely limited.)  So however much you think you know about a subject, be prepared to need to learn more.

Map It

I’ve talked to writers who have had reviewers call out nit-picks of their setting.  We’re talking things like having the character turn the wrong way on what is in the real world a one-way street.  Accurate locations become even more important if you are writing non-fiction.  You don’t want to tell your readers that a business is opening in Prosper, Texas when it is actually opening in Princeton.  Or get them lost trying to find that adorable café you visited in rural Japan.  Fiction or nonfiction, maps can be your friend.  This is true even when you have entirely invented the town, country or planet where your story is set.  Readers will map the places you mention in their heads, and they will be confused or frustrated when you are inconsistent.

Keep Records

Even if you haven’t decided to set a story there, when you travel, take notes about interesting places and facts.  (I tend to do this using my Instagram account, which has the added bonus of attaching photos to help me recall details.)  I tend to take photos of random things that may make for useful specific details.  You have no idea how many vending machines, manhole covers, and benches I photographed in Japan.

If you are writing nonfiction, historical fiction or certain types of science fiction, you may need to provide a bibliography to the editor acquiring your work.  (If you are indie publishing, it can be helpful to supply this information directly to the reader.)  Keeping one as you go is certainly much easier than retroactively trying to remember what source you found a specific fact in.  (Trust me—I’ve done it.  It’s a headache.)

I also wish I had kept up better with my Story Bible for my on-going fiction series.  It is difficult to retroactively build a consistent timeline when events of one story have to line up with what you said about the character’s backstory three books ago.

You never know what information will prove useful.  I tend to collect it all, just in case.  But do whatever works for you.