{"id":883,"date":"2009-03-27T02:47:00","date_gmt":"2009-03-27T02:47:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bestfantasynovel.com\/2009\/03\/27\/research\/"},"modified":"2009-03-27T02:47:00","modified_gmt":"2009-03-27T02:47:00","slug":"research","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/taramayastales.com\/bestfantasynovel\/2009\/03\/27\/research\/","title":{"rendered":"Research"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/1.bp.blogspot.com\/_sS4sIiNH6pg\/Scw_r6yvXnI\/AAAAAAAAAJg\/TXB1q2qeoJ0\/s1600-h\/Research-01.jpg\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/1.bp.blogspot.com\/_sS4sIiNH6pg\/Scw_r6yvXnI\/AAAAAAAAAJg\/TXB1q2qeoJ0\/s320\/Research-01.jpg\" border=\"0\" alt=\"\"><\/a><\/p>\n<div>Research &#8212; and its counterpart, worldbuilding &#8212; used to be my greatest joy in writing. Recently, I often feel so pressured to add beans to the wordcount, I don&#8217;t feel I can afford to luxuriate in research as I used to.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>The project I&#8217;m working on now is research-intensive. I thought I&#8217;d done most of the research already, working on a non-fiction piece.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>However, as I&#8217;ve \u00a0started working on a detailed outline, I&#8217;ve realized the needs of non-fiction and fiction\u00a0diverge greatly. For non-fiction, I mostly needed to know <span>when<\/span>, <span>where<\/span> and <span>who<\/span>. With those facts, I can speculate on <span>why<\/span>. For fiction I need to answer much more about <span>how<\/span>. How did it smell? How did it look? How did it taste? Only then can I speculate on how it felt.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>My outline\/draft so far is peppered with notes to myself: [NEED: <span>description of a fishing ship<\/span>] All of these notes are promises to myself to do research.\u00a0<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>Characters require research too. Names must fit the culture and period. Every character, even minor ones, needs a rough biography, and the major characters need a study with all their likes, dislikes, habits, childhood friends, mannerisms and so on. These character quirks cannot be simply drawn from my own circle of friends or my own imagination. Neither my personal experience nor my imagination is adequate to the task. I need to read real biographies, and draw inspiration from those. More research.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>My husband points out I could research forever and never be satisfied. He may be right. But I&#8217;ve also found research to be the best\u00a0antedote\u00a0to writer&#8217;s block. Sometimes, after deep reading of some\u00a0fascinating\u00a0culture, historical event or real person, I find myself so inspired I <span>have<\/span> to write down my own response, transformed into fiction.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>How much research do you do in order to write your stories?<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Research &#8212; and its counterpart, worldbuilding &#8212; used to be my greatest joy in writing. Recently, I often feel so pressured to add beans to the wordcount, I don&#8217;t feel I can afford to luxuriate in research as I used to. The project I&#8217;m working on now is research-intensive. I thought I&#8217;d done most of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[426,454],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-883","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-research","category-secret-novel"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/taramayastales.com\/bestfantasynovel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/883","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/taramayastales.com\/bestfantasynovel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/taramayastales.com\/bestfantasynovel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/taramayastales.com\/bestfantasynovel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/taramayastales.com\/bestfantasynovel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=883"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/taramayastales.com\/bestfantasynovel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/883\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/taramayastales.com\/bestfantasynovel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=883"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/taramayastales.com\/bestfantasynovel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=883"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/taramayastales.com\/bestfantasynovel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=883"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}