Quick and Dirty Research for Writers
I recently wrote a lot of flash fiction stories for a casual contest. My stories were all over the place in terms of topics, including a medieval Catholic saint, mushrooms, seventh century Korean and Chinese history, and tea leaf reading, and a few people commented on the breadth of topics, trivia, and knowledge.
But as it turns out, it’s not so much knowledge as it is knowing how to do some quick and dirty research for a story.
Because these stories are flash fiction, and because I had only a couple of days to write each one, there’s not space or time to do deep research. These stories were all under 750 words, which meant that my research was primarily getting a quick overview of a topic, enough to pick out a detail or two that fit into the story. For some of the stories, I wrote a good number of words before I decided I needed that detail or two to really sell the premise, while others had the research front loaded, to give me the ideas for how I was going to approach the plot.
So I either wind up doing a quick targeted search, like for spooky looking mushrooms that a tween boy could know about, or I wind up with a dozen plus connected Wikipedia articles and selected references from those articles and so many browser tabs open that I can’t tell what’s what, as I’m trying to piece together the international relations between China and one Korean kingdom at a very specific point in time. (There is no in between for me.)
I think the larger trick to doing quick and dirty research as a write is to know what you need and what you don’t. Because I’ve done a lot of research for my education and day job, I’m familiar with the utility of doing only enough research to answer the question you need answered. So if I need to know what common tea leaf reading shapes and interpretations are, I find that information and then stop digging. This isn’t easy, especially because I love research rabbit holes (see above about the dozen plus Wikipedia articles). But if I’ve answered the question sufficiently to write the story, I probably don’t need to read seven articles that essentially contain similar information.
The second part of this trick is that if there’s a topic you’re interested in pursuing further, pop all of the URLs into a document (or bookmark them, if that works better for you), with maybe a handful of notes about what you were researching, and save it for later. You can always return to the research later, whether as part of revisions or just for your own edification. And it’s entirely possible that the saved research could inspire something else, either directly related to the first piece you wrote, or approaching the topic from a different angle.
And believe me when I say that you want to save the URLs. In the history world, this is what we call a research log. It tracks what you’ve researched already so you don’t have to repeat the research (or “reinvent the wheel”). With additional notes on what you were thinking at the time you were doing the research, it serves as an external form of memory, which is super valuable if you tend to forget things or have to take a long break between doing the initial research and doing something with it.
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