NaNoWriMo Day 22
Before I begin, I need to point out that I am one of those fiction writers who deals in the real world. Personally, I think that there is so much interesting stuff out there in the world that I’ll never be able to investigate even a tiny fraction of it, so I’m happy to bump things around like a kid playing with toy trucks instead of having to build a world from scratch. The downside of this is that unlike writers of fantasy, sci-fi, paranormal adolescent magical werevampire, realities based in alternate timelines, and things like that, I have to generally live under the constraints of the real world.
That means I have to do the research. If I say the Seven Sacred Pools are south of Sedona, there will be at LEAST one person who will point out that they’re they’re quite clearly to the north and that I’m a complete idiot for even suggesting otherwise. I also write about subjects that are both complex and have fanbases that are extremely detail-oriented about them, like ballet. A fouetté is a fouetté, unless it’s an Italian fouetté (which is not just a fouetté served with pasta) or any of the several other kinds of fouetté which… well, you get the point.
I pride myself on getting it right. As a reader, I enjoy learning little details about the world even if it is from fiction, and I get pleasure out of giving my readers the same pleasure in return. I like getting into the minutiae and the history and all sorts of things about which I’m writing, over 90% of which I’ll never use. So how do I find the time to write and spend hours and hours researching what I’m writing about?
Simple: I don’t.
Here’s a quick way to tell if you’re doing writing or doing research: if words are coming out, you’re writing. If they’re going in, you’re researching. It doesn’t matter if they’re going in now in order to come out later. If they’re not coming out, you’re not writing.
November is when you write. Get your story down. Get those 50k written. You don’t need to know whether it snows in Sedona. It’s in Arizona, so it probably doesn’t. But it’s in northern Arizona, so maybe it does. (It does, actually.) Unless your character suffers from the same condition my wife does and will immediately die if the temperature drops below 50 degrees (Fahrenheit definitely, Celsius maybe), you don’t need to know that until December. Get your story down, then make it right. It needs to be right eventually, but eventually isn’t November.
Let me quote myself on the difference between getting it written and getting it right:
[F]or 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.
Not letting yourself lose the writing focus by innocently “just taking a minute” to do research is such an important topic that I recommend reading the “Save Time Writing” post where that came from. You’ll also get some tips about when it actually is okay to look something up. (The “does it snow in Sedona” question actually would have been acceptable to look up, and in that post, you’ll see why.)
Keep your fingers on the keys and your head in the writing. You’re almost three-quarters of the way there!
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