Research

The Business of Writing: Do your serious research when you’ve finished your book.

If you’re about to start writing a novel, then do your serious research when you’ve finished your book.

Yes, this sounds counter-intuitive…after all, how can you write a novel unless you know all the details about what you’re writing. But assuming you have a good idea of the plot and the characters, all other things can come later.

Why? Because if you do extensive research first, and make copious notes, what will happen is that you’ll write your research into the story, when you should be writing the story.

When the book is finished, when you’ve allowed it to sit on your computer, untouched, for a couple of weeks, then go back to the beginning and re-read it with a view to editing. You’ll come to a part which needs explanation, or greater depth, at which point you go to your notes on that aspect of your research, and you include the details in the story…not the other way around.

The other great advantage of doing the majority of research AFTER you’ve written your book, is that now the first draft of the novel is complete and awaiting editing, you have time and mental space to read around the facts.

Say, for example, you’re writing about one of your characters takes a trip into a country town. In the first draft, you may have just mentioned the name of the town, and then moved straight into an interaction between some of your characters. But now that you’re editing your first draft and you come to the section where your character enters the country town, you can research the town itself; its history, governance, economy, famous citizens and so much more. In your wider reading, it’s likely that you’ll uncover something of real interest to you, and which will probably be of interest to your readers.

You can introduce research to enhance your novel, but often it’s best to do it through character interaction

So how to introduce such a fact without superimposing it within the text…..because if you do, your readers will feel that you’re preaching to them.

The best way is to put it into the mouth of one of your characters. It could be during a drive, when they pass a statue, and one character says something like, “Who’s that?”….to which the other character says, “Him? Oh, that’s a former State Governor, who was born in this town. There’s an interesting story about him….when he was growing up…..” And in that way, it’s part of the social interaction between characters; it shows that you’ve done deep research to inform your novel; and it doesn’t feel as though you’re preaching to your readership.