Larry M. Coleman

Dumb devices are making a comeback as people find that being online everywhere, all the time has enormous drawbacks. Many writers become writers because they’re huge readers, and having an entire internet available to read just a click away is too large a temptation to resist. But you don’t have to buy dumb to not be dumb.

Switching over to a browser tab “just to do a little research” is a time-honored and extremely effective way to avoid writing. After all, you just have to know that one particular fact before you can go on to the next sentence, right? Certainly it couldn’t hurt, and it might give a little inspiration at that stuck moment, right?

Wrong and wrong. I’ve used the “Two Minute Rule” for about twenty years, ever since I first read it in David Allen’s Getting Things Done. In short, if you can do it in two minutes, just do it and forget it.

I use my own version of the same rule when I’m writing to avoid “working procrastination,” AKA “harmless research”:

If you can’t know the answer in less than two minutes, make a note and write through it.

Examples:

Write Through	Look up and get back to work
When is a good age to start ballet?	How old was Natalia Osipova when she started lessons?
Why was Joan of Arc so popular?	When was Joan of Arc born?
Is Sedona a nice place to live?	Does it snow in Sedona?

Some days you’ll feel like writing and everything comes easily, and other days the well just isn’t pumping. You can use those dry-brain days to work on the left column sorts of questions.

If you took my advice and just wrote through the first question, you might even find you don’t need to step into the endless and bitter debate on when a child should start ballet. If you just look up when a famous ballerina started (and there is hardly a more famous contemporary ballerina than Natalia Osipova) and see that she started at nine, then having your character start at eight is perfectly reasonable. You don’t even have to do the research to know that, contrary to public opinion, many, many ballet superstars don’t start at the age of three—even Baryshnikov didn’t start until twelve and he’s so famous his name is in the spellcheck dictionary. If someone says your character would have had to start before she was even potty trained to be famous, you can just say that no one’s ever danced Don Quixote or Giselle better than Osipova and she didn’t start until nine. Then you can go on with your life and watch a short video of her proving you right:

If you’re asking why Joan of Arc was so popular, you might be looking at an eye-glazing infodump just waiting to be plopped onto the page. Make your own version of her likable first. Write through it and then once you get finished with the manuscript (which you will never do if you keep falling down rabbit holes), you can see if you came close or add a detail or two to make it even more realistic. Write what you have to write before you start worrying about what someone else wrote.

As only one example from my own writing, for an important scene, I needed to know the term for what she’s doing at the beginning of the video below where she’s tapping quickly across the floor:

The correct terminology was important because the main character has been teaching her art-challenged, pro athlete boyfriend to dance. He needs to show that he understands some of what she’s talking about so she can be impressed that he’s taking it seriously because it’s important to her. This means that I definitely would need to know what that little gliding thing is called eventually.

And there’s the key word: eventually. I didn’t need to know it right that second, which is good because try describing that to a search engine in a way that will give you a useful result. So I just called it “skittering” and wrote through it. Quite a while later, I ended up finding out the answer (bourrée en couru) while watching a video on an entirely different subject. What’s important is that I didn’t end up getting out of the flow of writing, spending hours on searches and videos instead.

Am I saying to never do research? Absolutely not. What I am saying is to finish first. Do the research during the revision process. You quite likely may find that something that seemed important enough to get sucked into researching it will be something you’re glad you didn’t because by the time you’re done, that “critical” little distraction ends up not even making it past the first cut.

When the time comes to do the research, do it well. Be proud that you’ve made the revised manuscript as good as you think you can. Take the time to get things right—but don’t take that time until you’ve actually written what you have to say.