I feel like people frame my researching my stories as... a virtuous thing I do? But in most cases it's just a technique for getting and keeping my flibbertigibbet brain in harness. My best method for encouraging inspiration is to kill time with possibly-relevant reading, waiting until something catches my attention. And my best method for having a productive writing session is to back-burner the story between whiles, which is more likely to happen if I can keep my brain vaguely tethered to the topic instead of letting it dart off after whatever distracting shiny it sees while I'm going about my life. Thus my habit of deliberately giving my brain lots of vaguely on-topic things to read during the writing period.
That these things sometimes result in a "well-researched" story is a happy side-effect, although it doesn't always work out that way. Almost nothing of the "keep my brain on-topic" reading from Nostoi worked its way into the final draft. (Possibly because I didn't realize what motifs I would be trying to develop until it was too late to read anything related to them? I would have been reading The Odyssey, if I'd realized what I'd be playing with in my final retooling.)
It is true that when I need to research stuff -- the first time I wrote an Australian character, a Metis character, a frontier Jewish character -- I have a convenient and established habit that I can turn to that? But most of the time all this reading and thinking is less "researching" and more "not giving my brain space to wander off-topic, because if I did I'd never finish the damned thing."
(*cough* thirty-one wips in my drafts file *cough*)
Sorry, that should probably be its own post or something. But several people have said something similar this go, and I was trying to figure out why it wasn't settling easily for me. La, la, la...
HIJINKS: Would that drawing-room comedies were my forte! :-D
Hah, I spent the entire time that book was checked out wondering if I could let it go or not. And then I edited it during the literal hour before I went to turn it in, because as you say: it had to be done. May the library gods have mercy on me. Or if not, may Bright-Eyed Athena intercede on my behalf...
That these things sometimes result in a "well-researched" story is a happy side-effect, although it doesn't always work out that way. Almost nothing of the "keep my brain on-topic" reading from Nostoi worked its way into the final draft. (Possibly because I didn't realize what motifs I would be trying to develop until it was too late to read anything related to them? I would have been reading The Odyssey, if I'd realized what I'd be playing with in my final retooling.)
It is true that when I need to research stuff -- the first time I wrote an Australian character, a Metis character, a frontier Jewish character -- I have a convenient and established habit that I can turn to that? But most of the time all this reading and thinking is less "researching" and more "not giving my brain space to wander off-topic, because if I did I'd never finish the damned thing."
(*cough* thirty-one wips in my drafts file *cough*)
Sorry, that should probably be its own post or something. But several people have said something similar this go, and I was trying to figure out why it wasn't settling easily for me. La, la, la...
HIJINKS: Would that drawing-room comedies were my forte! :-D
Hah, I spent the entire time that book was checked out wondering if I could let it go or not. And then I edited it during the literal hour before I went to turn it in, because as you say: it had to be done. May the library gods have mercy on me. Or if not, may Bright-Eyed Athena intercede on my behalf...
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