Ratika Deshpande
“Write what you know” is common advice, but sometimes, we need to know more about the things we’re using in our stories, and that requires research.
The illusion of research as productive work
But research is a double-edged sword: it is as distracting as it is useful. As you click on yet another link about the history of pencils or download another book on pioneers in early childhood education, it can seem that you’re getting a lot of work done—just look at the all the notes you’ve made, the tags you’ve added, the long list of bookmarks saved in your browser.
But more time spent on research—along with elaborate systems for recording what you find—doesn’t necessarily mean you’re researching effectively. It just means you’re spending a lot of time that could be utilized in a better way to help you write your story.
Consider when to outline vs when to directly write a first draft
One way of making research effective is to consider what form you’re writing—is it a book of historical fiction? A medical story featuring fairies and aliens? A travelogue about your visit to ancient human settlements? A personal essay about your family home that has since been razed down?
In some cases, you might want to first outline your story. This is especially important in reported nonfiction, where everything is fact-checked before publishing. Any wrong information on which you base your entire draft (many such stories have 5,000+ words) will cost you a lot of time and effort since your foundation would crumble.
In other cases, it would be more effective to write a first draft. You can first tell how the fairies responded to inhumane medical procedures by the ruling alien class with violent revolution and then figure out the details of the said procedure and its effects.
This is not to say, however, that the research into such procedures you undertook for fun might not someday prove useful. A lot of our stories stem from such unplanned reading. The problem is deciding to write about a fairy revolution against unethical surgery, then spending hours on undirected research and then never writing the actual story.
Both an outline and a first draft can help you recognize what it is that you need to know more about. Once you identify the gaps, your research can become more focused.
To avoid too much distraction and create a useful plan, I suggest making a checklist. The surgery on the fairies might be destroying their long-term memory, for example. You might thus want to look into the various types of long-term memory, how they’re formed and reconstructed, and how neurosurgery or accidents have affected long-term memory in particular patients. Or you might want to look into citizen-led changes in the ethical code of doctors.
Once you have a draft, which gives you an idea of the timeframe, the point of view, and the protagonist, you’ll know which particular subtopic to focus on. Your search will depend on whether your story, for example, is a history of the revolution, or a first-person telling as the violence unfolds, told from the perspective of a victim, their loved one, or the aliens. The alien surgeon might be having a dilemma, forced to perform the surgery on a fairy he’s in love with, in which case you might head towards the philosophy subsection. The victim’s loved one might be thinking of the relationship they’ve lost with the memories gone, in which case you might look to theories of loss and grief.
So, depending on your story, make an outline or write a draft, then go over the work to make a list of the specific details you need to fill in. As interesting the other bits might be, save them for reading when your story is done.
The benefits of offline, rather than online, research
On the web, research can seem endless. Hyperlinks can take you in a hundred different directions, which will not only suck up your time but also make you feel overwhelmed because you won’t know what to read first. And it’ll encourage perfectionism, because you’ll think you need to know more, more, and more before you’ve researched “enough” to write even the first line of your story.
An antidote to this that I love is conducting your research offline. We think the limitlessness of the internet is a blessing but offline research might actually provide you with something more interesting, since constraints enhance, not diminish, creativity.
Instead of opening your laptop, consider heading to a bookstore or a library. Use the dictionary to look up not just meanings but etymologies and related words. Read an encyclopedia or the newspaper. Maybe even pick up a school textbook.
These are definitely useful in fiction writing, but they can open the doors for nonfiction too: you might find an interesting place nearby to explore and write about, or a local citizen who’s been working on improving her neighborhood for three decades now. The bulk of the research in such cases will require you to step outside the house instead of inside a computer screen.
And that, in addition to making research less distracting and more fruitful, might make your work distinctive—for you’d be noticing what’s not easily available online or trending everywhere. You might literally be going on, to quote Robert Frost, the road not taken.
Bio: Ratika Deshpande is a writer from India. Her work has appeared in Authors Publish, Reactor Magazine, the Brevity Blog, and other platforms. You can support her writing here.
