research is needed

Book In A Year Series-Month 4: The Hope Of Working Knowledge

Writers are readers.

What I want you to remember as Month 4 of this process ends, is that writing will require you to chase your imagination. It will require you honoring your intellectual curiosity, and be willing to have a certain amount of walking around (working) knowledge.

Now, what do I mean when I say walking around or working knowledge? This is a set of information that you have independent of other outside research or knowledge. These are just things you know because you have experience them, learned of them, or even went to school to learn. Since you know these things, research is not paramount to your writing–it is a back up!

Lydia King is a writer, and a doctor. When she wrote Opium and Absinthe, she had the medical knowledge to write about the pain her protag was experiencing and even the reason why. Yet, due to the setting of the story, she still had to research what would make the setting accurate! You cannot get away from research: it is only the amount that you must research!

Reading is the cheapest way to feed that working knowledge. Feed your head–keep reading. Your imagination will thank you.

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Book In A Year Series-Month 4: Out Of Whole Cloth, Or Not (Or The Danger Of Open Sources)

Writers are known to make things up as you go.

Even the writer Tananarive Due said that sometimes, as a writer, that you must ‘make up’ what you need. There is nothing wrong with that, of course, yet, there are things that you must be mindful of.

A good rule of thumb as a writer is that if you have elements in your story that have a basis in your current reality (geography, specific people, certain lore, etc), you need to have a trusted site to reference. Here is where we get tp the meat of the matter: open sources vs. closed sources.

Open sources: this is software (or a cite) that everyone can see, anyone can modify and can share as they see fit. Since these sources are not regulated, they are not trusted. This is why Wikipedia is not a trusted source.

Closed sources:  systems use code that is proprietary and kept secret to prevent its use by other entities. Traditionally, they are sold for a profit. Only the original authors of software can access, copy, and alter that software. These are articles are found on search engines (Google, Bing, etc).

What I want you to remember on your journey to writing is you always want to use a closed source because it will grant you accurate information. When you are constructing a world, you need accurate information. Once you have a foundation of information, you can augment as you see fit–but you need that foundation to be sure!

Research Tip #2: Bookmark your resource sites, It will save your heartache in the long run. You’re welcome.

Research Made Yours: The Power Of Making Your Own Myth

There is a blessing in creating your own world.

And with all that creation, you need something that will hold it together. You need the thread that belief and myth provide.

When I began my writing career, I was in a sort of tailspin. I knew that I wanted to write, but I also knew that I wanted to write about a great many things!

(This is where I must plug the necessity for you as a writer to have a tribe or network by which you are engaged. It can be life saving! Don’t knock social media!)

I follow several writers on Twitter. None have been so gracious as the magnanimous Tananarive Due. She is a published writer (NYT Best Selling, mind you) and she teaches at UCLA. The fact that she would have time to even answer me, a struggling, have drowning writer in the social media ether was monumental.

I asked her about making time to write. I asked her about how she made time. I even asked her about research and work. Tananarive Due gave me a piece of advice that I will give to you:

“Make it up.”

She told me this in response to needing a myth, specific research for a topic. Her advice was if I didn’t see it, couldn’t find it, just make it up. Tananarive Due didn’t know that she had just shattered the glass ceiling of my imagination.

With imagination being my fuel and conduit to express my thoughts on the world, I did not know I could do that. I did not know I could make up what I needed independent of what I had seen in a book. I didn’t know I could do that–be allowed to do that!

In reminding me of what I am, of what I am allowed to do, that freed me is a writer. It let me explore with a more fearless stance. It allowed me to research, to read, not just to take as gospel fact–but to analyze. To bend. To reinterpret. To make my own.

As a writer, a teacher, I give you this same freedom. I free you from the staunch mechanics of your imaginations! You are a writer, so write. You have to absolute right to construct and deconstruct the worlds you create as you see fit! You must make up what you need, by simple virtue of needing it.

Go forth and create. Challenge your imagination, and see what the fruits are and become of it. Remember the guiding light from the Dark Tower of Stephen King as you do: “Do not come soft to the blank page.”