5 Tips for Book Research

Men with uteruses, midwifery, quantum computing, Huntington’s Disease, suppressor genes, under population, and dolphin sleep patterns are all fascinating topics that have lured me in while I’ve been writing novels. Who wouldn’t be intrigued? It’s tempting to spend hours and hours learning cool new things in the name of research for a novel. But it’s hard to know which information will actually be useful, and more importantly, it’s hard to know when to stop. If a writer spends months or years doing research for a novel she hasn’t started, that could be a clue that the novel will never happen.

Here are 5 guidelines that work for me.

1. If, while I’m reading about something new (like quantum computing), part of my brain is actively lighting up with questions about how I could use the information in a specific scene or setting (the temperature has to be really cold for a quantum computer, and it needs to be isolated, too, so deep space or a cave might work), then I keep reading. The new information is actively triggering ideas for the novel, and that’s golden.

2. If I already have a scene written, but I fudged the details (like for a Cesarean birth—how many layers of tissue does one need to cut through?) then I consult a source (a midwife friend) to learn answers to specific questions.

3. When I find a great Internet source on a topic, I bookmark the site and save it in my Book Research tab so I can return to it easily. There’s nothing worse than wondering, where did I read that? What exactly was that tidbit again?

4. If I’m already writing and I discover I need new information on a topic, I do not stop writing to look it up right then. This may sound counter-intuitive, but if I go looking for the info, I’ll invariably get distracted and it may be hours before I return to my narrative thread. It’s much better, I find, to keep my writing going, make a side note of what I need to learn, and look it up later, once the harder work of writing is over for the day.

5. I don’t take many notes. Again, this may seem counter-intuitive, but I need new information to be alive in my mind, flexible and malleable, so it can mix in with my fiction. Writing down notes, especially pages of them, can provide a false trap of seeming productivity. Furthermore, notes can take on an authority of their own, so the information feels fixed and worthy of a footnote. If note-taking helps you internalize new information, then certainly do it, but free yourself from thinking it’s required. There’s no follow-up test—just a novel to write.

One last thing. If I can’t follow these tips, if a topic (like the cholera epidemic of London in 1854) intrigues me so much that I need to abandon my writing for a while to go off and explore, then I just do it. I don’t kid myself that it’s book research. It’s pure discovery, and that’s one of the joys of a curious mind. Indulge.