Welcome to my creativity series, see first article here. This the second article on creativity.
Recap
To recap on article one, I covered tips on how to tap into your own creativity such as a change of scenery and journalling your ideas and thoughts and writing down your dreams. In addition, see my writing tips for short quick advice.
What is article creativity 2 about?
This article will cover research: how to research and the importance of it in relation to creative writing.
Research? and how to start researching?
So, you have a writing idea after some brainstorming, a few pages of scribble that could be a great novel before moving onto outlining and chapter overview, it is best to research. Be open to many forms of research from the internet, books, news and people. Firstly, identify what you need to know and be more specific not just a general search of ‘life in Edwardian times’, but niche down further than that. The following advice will help hone your research so that is helps your story not hinders.
The Area
The first point to research effectively is to research the area your story is set in. Make sure the street names are correct for that area of town or village and check whether is it a village or a town. Each town had its own council and tourist information page, and these can provide links to community pages. From the community pages you could arrange conversations or interview local people to talk about the area and what it is like and how it has changed over the years. In addition, you can pick up on different sayings that only local people use.
The second point is to use Google Maps to search the area and use street view to get the correct layout of the roads. Spend some time recreating walks in Google Maps that your character will take from the pub to home or from farm to Tavern (if your story is set in the past).The community pages are a treasure trove of information for the past – including old businesses, housing, estates, photos and prominent people who lived and contributed to the town.
A final point on researching the area is to travel there (if funds permit) to really get a feel for the area and recreate the walks your character will take and understand the local sayings of other towns.
News
Another form of research is to use the news to find out more about the people and the town. Go directly to a news website such as the BBC, CNN, MSNBC, Guardian, Reuters and other papers such as Daily telegraph: search the website for prominent people of the area or the town itself. Purchase one of their local papers and look at past editions. Also, look at The British Newspaper Archive online, they have hundreds of past editions fully digitised newspapers from 1800 to present day. Other websites to help with historical facts and life in previous centuries are historyextra.com and Victorian-era.org. A new story can be formed out of this research, and new characters could be created.
Other Sources on the Internet
Don’t forget to use other search engines such as Bing, Yahoo, Ecosia and Duck go – DuckDuckgo is good at answering questions it can list different results which will aid your research.
Save your Research
The best advice I could give is to save all this information either use an online service such as Nodes or Obsidian (these are paid services) or use free services such as Pinterest or create a scrapbook of research of newspaper clippings and printouts.
Books
It is a good idea to read books fiction and non-fiction for other points of the story such as procedures in certain professions like a French detective novel set in the 1920s Paris, Maigret by George Simmons or a present-day French-Canadian Anthropologist Dr Temperature Brennan by Kathy Reichs. Also, note on the dialogue and description used, most modern novels have much tighter dialogue and less description. By reading more books this can expand your writing knowledge and help make your writing come to life and it will also help to develop your own writing style.
Final thoughts
The importance of research for all stories is to make the story believable and to engage the audience and attract new followers to your writing. Research can be used as part of your writing creative process but try not to use it as an excuse to put off writing which is easy to do as research can become addicting. It can be easy to keep on researching and avoid writing but each individual needs to know when to stop researching and start writing.
