Unsuccessfully avoiding research

Silbrith is the Research Queen in our writing duo. She looks into locations, art, legends, foods, animals, and even the birds and the bees. That's not a euphemism. She researches literal birds and bees -- as shown in her subplot about honeybees. If you'd asked me five years ago, I'd have told you that doing research was low on my list of priorities. My goals were centered around getting into practice writing stories. I wanted to gain confidence and to hone my skills. I even wanted to share knowledge I already had with my readers. For instance, I wanted to shine a light on what grieving is like, and I thought I could provide insight into the bureaucracy of White Collar based on my own professional experience.

I absolutely was not in this for the research.

Nevertheless, research became intertwined with my efforts. It started out small. Given that Neal Caffrey had been known as "James Bonds" I thought it would be fun to include a Bond element, and I looked up the type of car 007 had driven in the older movies. I wanted Neal and other characters to love music, and so I created a playlist of songs released in 2004 and earlier to fit the setting of the stories.

Last week I posted about researching character voices. Since re-watching favorite episodes and casting actors for roles using images from IMDB and Pinterest is so fun, I was pulled into doing even more research without realizing what I was doing.

Sometimes it's difficult to draw the line between inspiration and research. Vacations led to ideas for stories, and then one time I selected a destination (St. Louis) because I wanted to know more about the location as a story setting. Watching an old holiday movie with my father inspired my backstory for Irene Caffrey as an actress. Later I watched Casablanca to get ideas for lines and character names in "Caffrey Disclosure."

What I did not expect was to sign up for online courses. I thought I was happy merely writing about psychologists like Noelle and Henry Winslow. Little did I know that I'd find them so fascinating that I'd start taking psychology classes. FYI, you can take classes from universities like Yale online through Coursera.

I've also been following organizations that report on innovations in science and engineering, using their articles as inspiration for the novel I've set hundreds of years in the future.

Sometimes I think I'm getting better at my day job because of the techniques I've learned for gathering and organizing the information I've learned while researching elements of my stories. And sometimes techniques I've learned at work help me with organizing plots. My sticky-note outlines for "Caffrey Flashback" and "Caffrey Disclosure" were definitely influenced by what I'd learned at work regarding backlog management. My training and experiences in Scrum and Agile helped the "plotter" in me embrace the more chaotic, go-with-the-flow "pantser" side of writing. Aspects of my job could be seen as research into how to organize and approach big projects like writing a novel.

In addition to learning about an array of topics through my stories, I've learned something about research. When the topic is something I'm passionate about, research ceases to feel like a burden, and instead becomes an adventure.

Silbrith remains the Research Queen, and I'm happy to say I've learned to enjoy being her apprentice! She's offered to teach me basics of html so I can have even more fun blogging. The research and learning continue...