Feature - Researching to Add Richness

[chomiji]

Sometimes, you're writing nothing but a blistering hot love scene, or a character study, or a drabble. In those cases, your canon is all you'll want or need. But there are other times - Yuletide, a Big Bang, your own original novel-in-progress, that sprawling AU epic that's been taking up all your spare imagination for weeks - when you're going

Comments

[spiletta42]

Great google tips. Site:edu is one of the most valuable hints ever, for fiction research or otherwise. I find that Internet research is excellent for forming a specific list of questions before hitting the library, or for verifying facts that my memory is correct on facts I only fuzzily recall. Everyone probably has this one figured out by now, but slowly typing your first search term will bring up many hilarious useful search suggestions -- I've found some interesting articles that way.

Side note on Wikipedia and their footnotes: never edit multiple articles to footnote the same source. Years ago, someone cut and pasted large sections of my non-fandom website to Wikipedia. Another someone "helped" by footnoting my site as the source before they emailed me about it. It banned links to my site as spam, forever, and that's probably why my emails complaining about the plagiarism were ignored. So please, don't make that mistake for some other innocent site owner.

For research beyond the web, I find that documentaries are fantastic for providing an overview on a topic. A single episode of NOVA can save hours of reading and really give direction to the research that follows. And don't be afraid of kids' books. I often start my research with something aimed at ten year olds and go from there, that way I don't end up with a bunch of specific facts about one aspect of a topic, while knowing absolute squat about some very basic fact in that field and making a mistake as a result.

Also, here's one that a few (American) folks might find useful this time of year: when looking for IRS instructions for specific forms, or rules for specific circumstances, always include "pdf" in your search terms. It eliminates so very many useless FAQ pages and takes you straight to the instructions themselves. Which for some reason the IRS provides only in pdf format anyway, so you're stuck opening Adobe either way.

[chomiji]

I love kids' books for lots of reasons. David McCauley's detailed picture books on buildings are complete awesomesauce, for example.

Thanks for the additional tips!