Pack your bags - Empowering research - Drafting, researching, and editing

Creative writing - Mike Sanders 2014

Pack your bags
Empowering research
Drafting, researching, and editing

Many writers hate research. They don’t want to spend hours, days, months, and sometimes even years researching a topic for their work. They just want to write.

When it comes to research, creative writers usually should only write what they know. Exclusive topics written in your field of experience not only makes you sound like an expert on your topic to your readers, but also helps you avoid lengthy research sessions. Yet if you want to write about Somali pirates, then prepare to do some research. Even if you only watch a few pirate documentaries and read a few books, you have to know what you’re talking about.

If you want to write about Thailand, the best research you can do is to go there for yourself and experience things as closely to how your character would experience them. Taste the food, mingle with the locals, and get firsthand experience of life there. Moreover, part of Thailand’s fascination is that it’s a very corrupt country. Drugs, sex trafficking, and STDs are everyday elements of the culture. You need to learn about them, too, but be smart about it. Travel in a group or with a couple armed government officials.

Of course, if you’re writing a historical novel or a futuristic novel, a writer can’t actually travel through time. However, museums and space camps and meeting with university professors is a great place to start.

To be a successful creative writer, you must absorb information as naturally as possible. Doing your research, visiting your setting in person, and experiencing a new perspective will add realism and detail to your novel that would otherwise escape your awareness. If you have the opportunity to experience the location of your story in person, do what it takes to get there.

The internet is an excellent resource for beginning your travel research. If you’re writing a book that takes place in Libya, get online and check out the many websites where you can interact with expatriates who speak English. Skype, email, and Facebook can help you keep in touch with them.

WATCH OUT!

Although the internet can be helpful in your research, be careful about the personal information you provide about yourself, especially if some of your contacts are from a war-ravaged country and are desperate for cash (Libya, for example) or involved in activity that would be criminal in the United States (Thailand).

If you’re writing about wildlife in Africa, some nature-protection websites have posted cameras throughout national parks to monitor wildlife and protect them from poachers and offer the feed on their site. So although you might not be able to afford that trip your character makes in real life, you can still use the internet to get as close as you possibly can without having to worry about poachers, rebel massacres, or predatory jungle creatures.

Another travel resource is reading other books. Writers who are on a tight budget and unable to travel can get snapshots of the country they’re interested in just by readings books about it published in or about the years that interest them. Travel books can take you to faraway places. Nonfiction memoirs in particular can give you a good detailed idea of what life was really like at a given time. Fiction and poetry can provide you with that extra bit of creativity.

If all that doesn’t seem like enough, consider meeting with local specialists. A local expert, such as a college professor, is usually all too happy to talk about his or her favorite place and perhaps has even recently returned from an exciting expedition.

Just remember that however you choose to do your research, always add those bit of details of the senses (touch, taste, sound, sight, smell) to give your creative writing the extra edge that makes it seem like the reader is being transported to the place your book wants to go.