Any writing project is going to involve research. The topics can range from how clothes were made in ancient Greece to debates over the best way to colonize Venus, and a thousand points in-between. Creativity is always important, but the wrong mistake in how things actually work can snap a reader out of the story.

I believe we should all have a good idea of how research works, so I’m not going to spend time on the concept. What I will do it touch base on a few research-related topics that I’ve found important during my writing projects. They are to not let research interfere with writing, check your sources, and keep track of your data.

Research Before and After Writing

I have a problem with stopping mid-scene to conduct research. It’s very annoying to have a lunch hour to write, and to spend forty minutes of it trying to figure out what I need for a riverboat scene to be realistic.

If I know something is going to be important ahead of time, I research ahead of time. These topics tend to be the larger topics that are important across much of the story. For example, in Templar Scholar I had to know how many troops a train could carry in 1880, and how long it would take for troops to move from A to B. So, I did a lot of research on that topic.

The other issue is when something pricks at me while I’m writing. These are small topics that I usually find myself wanting to check or learn about only because they came up in a scene. This happens a lot in the Renaissance Army series with daily life events, like researching what clothes and food were common to frontier settlements. With these topics, I’ve had to put in a place holder, usually an astrix, and come back later to research and fix.

The main point is that I try not to stop writing unless I absolutely have to stop.

Check Your Sources

This is important. There are few topics that don’t have fan or enthusiast pages, and these pages can pop up early and often when you’re trying to research a topic. Try researching a WW2 topic and avoiding getting some Call of Duty information, or the British system of purchasing officer’s commissions without hitting fan pages for Jayne Austen books or the Sharpe series. Knowing where they got their info — or bypassing them entirely for professional or primary sources — will keep you from making a ridiculous mistake.

This is becoming even more important as AI gets more and more involved with internet searches. Even if you don’t use AI programs as they come and go, AI is becoming a staple of internet searches. Check what sources they use, and then check that those sources exist. Nothing quite so annoying and thinking ‘this title could be a great find!’ and then finding out the AI generated the title for you.

Keep your Data

Seriously.

It is — or was — a constant problem with many projects of mine. I would research something, then forget where I put the info. And that assumed that I even wrote it down; sometimes, I would enter what I needed into the story and fail to record what I had looked up and where I got the info.

This would come back to bite me when I wanted to change details, and suddenly I’m reaching to re-research what I’ve already gone through. Which website did I visit that had the answer? Six of the first page of the Google results are purple. so it’s probably one of those.

I’ve taken to having a subfolder within each project folder dedicated to research topics. It’s filled with notes, scans, maps, pdfs, basically everything I used to research a topic. It’s better than restarting from scratch every time I have to revisit a question.

Example: General of the Pen

Accounting for what I know about 1860’s era armies and their maneuvers, I wanted to focus on what I didn’t know. And a lot of that had to do with their logistical trains (that is, the wagons needed to carry their supplies and how much supplies were needed) and their spacing (how much space a unit would take up.

I lucked out and found a report that addresses both these topics; I believe it’s a school paper, and at 400+ pages, I’m guessing a higher-level thesis of some kind. It gets into Civil War Logistics and manages to provide me with several charts and equations regarding these topics. So much that I can answer most of my questions from this one document.

Some good examples of info I can use from this document:

• A regiment of 1000-men would nominaly have six wagons
• 1000-men marching in fours takes up 625 feet on the road
• A 6-mule wagon team takes up 60 feet of road space
• Men and Wagons for one regiment would come to 925 feet
• I’ll round to 1,000 feet to account for spacing between regiments

Checking the sources, I see a lot of primary documents (the orders and guidelines of the 1860’s) and books written by the people who were there. So I have little reason to doubt its veracity. But I will take each individual point and search for it, to see what comes up and if that point is challenges.

And I will save the notes in at least a project research folder, and possibly in the scrivener file itself.

Conclusion

Research is a part of writing, pretty much regardless of what genre you’re writing in. What’s important is that you make research a part of your process without letting it disrupt your flow. That you check your sources to make sure your accurate. And that you keep your research and data so you can refer to it later without having to re-research.

Next up on our PBRG process is Gaming, where I explain what a game is and how I use them to improve the writing process. I do anticipate coming back to Research in the future when I explore how different it is to research a Historical Fiction novel than anything else I’ve ever done.

Until then. Keep on writing.

Cheers!