The Importance of a Little Research

Research is maligned by way too many amateur writers. They feel that one should write what one knows, and that means what they know at the moment. Others see it as the boring part of writing, and they refuse to do anything boring. 

These people are idiots. 

As a writer you should always be expanding the boundaries of your knowledge. Those little nuggets may seem trivial to you at first glance, but they can be the difference between someone trying to respect the subject and someone actually respecting the subject, and your audience can tell the difference. Those that are limited to knowing just what they know will never be able to match the authenticity of someone who did their research, and the audiences will love them for it. 

Those that see it as boring would make lousy explorers. Research allows you to ask some of the weirdest questions and find the strangest facts; yu can explore the darkest jungle, the deepest seas, and the furthest stars. Sometimes that bit of trivia that you didn't think you would ever use can help you kill a victim in a way no one has ever seen before. If you don't end up on at least one government watchlist as a writer then you aren't doing it right.

I'm not necessarily saying you have to research every last detail for whatever you happen to be working on. Sometimes all you just need are 5-, 10-, 15-minutes searches, where you just need that one really weird term defined that you've never seen before. But if you happen to get lost researching, where you start in Google and then you hit a string of Wikipedia articles, and that branches into Youtube, all because you found something interesting about some particular term or person, well that really cool.

Getting lost in the research for hours is when you know you're doing it right. The best writers go in for a quick dip and end up diving deep; trivial knowledge is our bread and butter. and sometimes we just can't get enough.

But the key here is that writers need to constantly be researching. You should constantly be updating your knowledge, maintaining a ridiculously huge knowledge base. And from that knowledge base, you're going to find that you're going to be drawing on it in your stories; by doing that your stories are going to gain some depth, some extra emotion, and a level of reality that just adds a really cool level to your writing. 

Your stories with ring true on a lot of levels, and that truth makes your stories feel like they could actually happen, regardless of whether you are writing about a rogue scientist, the Russian Revolution, or fleet of dragons.  

So if someone say research is boring or not needed, then smile mysteriously, secure in the knowledge that your houses will stay together because they were built with more than prayers and dreams. You did your research and know how nails work, and have since 3000 BC. And that makes your stories that much more solid. Because you did the research....