RESEARCHING FOR YOUR NOVEL

The key to writing a believable book? Research. It keeps your readers from having to step out of your story for a moment to wonder if what you just wrote was realistic or not. You don’t want to raise red flags for them or disrupt the flow of your story with inaccurate or misleading information. Especially when it comes to writing in genres like historical fiction.

Before you start writing your book, you have to nail down your setting. That includes where and when your story takes place. I dabbled in historical fiction for All the Beautiful Things, and decided on the 1930s and 40s. I wanted to make my where very broad to make it seem like it could have taken place just about anywhere in the United States, as if it could be your own grandparents’ story. All that being said, there was still a lot of research to be done.

The 1930s brought in the great depression, and the book spans all the way through the second world war. All of that would have affected my characters’ lives and the culture that was surrounding them at the time. Their worries, their opinions, and the conflict surrounding them all needed to line up with what people were really experiencing at the time.

You need to do the same with your novels. Research the setting of your story and consider how it would have affected your characters. If your setting isn’t some sort of catalyst in your plot, you might not be looking closely enough.

A big help for me as I was researching was to not only look for dates and figures. Read stories from regular people who were there, listen to interviews, look through pictures, watch historically-accurate movies set in that time period. The emotion and attitudes relayed in sources like these are going to give you a much better understanding and appreciation of your setting than memorizing names and dates.

One thing I did for All the Beautiful Things was to find very specific pictures from that time period that embodied the emotion I wanted to express in my books. There were two main settings in that book, and I found pictures from that time period to represent each of them. Then I built the rest of the setting around those two pivotal visuals.

Another thing I did was open a word document and just start creating a list of linked sources to go back to as references when I questioned something as I was writing. Having a reliable source for everything in your book helps prevent you from just filling in blanks in your knowledge with educated guesses that may or may not be correct.

It may not be fun, but it must be done.

Fact check, fact check, fact check.