Writing FAST - Jeff Bollow 2012

When to research
Decide which way to go
Strengthen

A few hundred years ago, when explorers ventured out into the world, they would come back with magnificent exaggerated tales of giants, and natives, and secret villages, and such.

And readers believed every word. They had to. Who’s gonna question it? They had no way of knowing any different!

Today, forget about it. The internet changed the world. Information is at your fingertips. Heck, the whole world is at your fingertips. If you start telling magnificent exaggerated tales, you’ll get lambasted.

But it’s even more subtle than that.

If you don’t know your topic, your reader will know you don’t know it. Darabont couldn’t write Shawshank without researching prisons of that era.

If I wanted to write a scene about two lovers scuba diving in the Bahamas, I’d better do a little research. Either that, or pray my readers live in a room with no windows and no phone lines.

Give your work a Research grade when it’s got holes. When you like the basic idea and the way you’re presenting it. But it needs more. It needs to be authentic.

Research brings your work to life, and gives it a new layer of energy, and realism. Learn! Discover more about this idea you’re writing about. You’ll find new ways to write about it.

The trouble is, these new details will change your writing. It’ll shift. They’ll make you adjust other parts, too. And that’s why Research is the second “strongest” grade.

With a Re-Focus grade, you’ll find a new approach.

With a Research grade, you’ll keep the idea, but change its substance.

Give a section a Research grade when the Apply phase has pushed you too quickly through it — and you want to go deeper.