how to do research for novel

How to organize research for your novel

Follow this step-by-step guide to learn the modern process of organizing research in Milanote, a free tool used by top creatives.

How to organize your research in 7 easy steps

Whether you're writing a sci-fi thriller or historical fiction, research is a crucial step in the early writing process. It's a springboard for new ideas and can add substance and authenticity to your story. As author Robert McKee says "when you do enough research, the story almost writes itself. Lines of development spring loose and you'll have choices galore."

But collecting research can be messy. It's often scattered between emails, notes, documents, and even photos on your phone making it hard to see the full picture. When you bring your research into one place and see things side-by-side, new ideas and perspectives start to emerge.

In this guide, you'll learn the modern approach to collecting and organizing research for your novel using Milanote. Remember, the creative process is non-linear, so you may find yourself moving back and forth between the steps as you go.

1. First, add any existing notes

You probably know a lot about your chosen topic or location already. Start by getting the known facts and knowledge out of your head. Even if these topics seem obvious to you, they can serve as a bridge to the rest of your research. You might include facts about the location, period, fashion or events that take place in your story.

Create a new board to collect your research.

Create a new board

Drag a board out from the toolbar. Give it a name, then double click to open it.

Add a note to capture your existing knowledge on the topic.

Drag a note card onto your board

Start typing then use the formatting tools in the left hand toolbar.

2. Save links to articles & news

Wikipedia, blogs, and news websites are a goldmine for researchers. It's here you'll find historical events and records, data, and opinions about your topic. We're in the 'collecting' phase so just save links to any relevant information you stumble across. You can return and read the details at a later stage.

Drag a link card onto your board to save a website.

Install the  Milanote Web Clipper

Save websites and articles straight to your board. 

Save content from the web

With the Web Clipper installed, save a website, image or text. Choose the destination in Milanote. Return to your board and find the content in the "Unsorted" column on the right.

3. Save quotes & data

Quotes are a great way to add credibility and bring personality to your topic. They're also a handy source of inspiration for character development, especially if you're trying to match the language used in past periods. Remember to keep the source of the quote in case you need to back it up.

Add a note to capture a quote.

4. Collect video & audio

Video and movie clips can help you understand a mood or feeling in a way that words sometimes can't. Try searching for your topic or era on Vimeo , or Youtube . Podcasts are another great reference. Find conversations about your topic on Spotify or any podcast platform and add them into the mix.

Embed Youtube videos or audio in a board. 

Embed Youtube videos or audio tracks in a board

Copy the share link from Youtube, Vimeo, Soundcloud or many other services. Drag a link card onto your board, paste your link and press enter.

5. Collect important images

Sometimes the quickest way to understand a topic is with an image. They can transport you to another time or place and can help you describe things in much more detail. They're also easier to scan when you return to your research. Try saving images from Google Images , Pinterest , or Milanote's built-in image library.

Use the built-in image library. 

Use the built-in image library

Search over 500,000 beautiful photos powered by Unsplash then drag images straight onto your board.

Save images from other websites straight to your board. 

Roll over an image (or highlight text), click Save, then choose the destination in Milanote. Return to your board and find the content in the "Unsorted" column on the right.

Allow yourself the time to explore every corner of your topic. As author A.S. Byatt says "the more research you do, the more at ease you are in the world you're writing about. It doesn't encumber you, it makes you free".

6. Collect research on the go

You never know where or when you'll find inspiration—it could strike you in the shower, or as you're strolling the aisles of the grocery store. So make sure you have an easy way to capture things on the go. As creative director Grace Coddington said, "Always keep your eyes open. Keep watching. Because whatever you see can inspire you."

Download the  Milanote mobile app

Save photos straight to your Research board. 

Take photos on the go

Shoot or upload photos directly to your board. When you return to a bigger screen you'll find them in the "Unsorted" column of the board.

7. Connect the dots

Now that you have all your research in one place, it's time to start drawing insights and conclusions. Laying out your notes side-by-side is the best way to do this. You might see how a quote from an interviewee adds a personal touch to some data you discovered earlier. This is the part of the process where you turn a collection of disparate information into your unique perspective on the topic.

That's a great start!

Research is an ongoing process and you'll probably continue learning about your topic throughout your writing journey. Reference your research as you go to add a unique perspective to your story. Use the template below to start your research or read our full guide on how to plan a novel .

Start your research

Get started for free with one of Milanote's beautiful templates.

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Table of Contents

Tip 1: Start with Your Positioning and Outline

Tip 2: make a research plan, tip 3: ask the internet, tip 4: read books, tip 5: talk to experts, tip 6: collect survey data, tip 7: keep everything organized.

• Tip 8: Set a Deadline & Stop Early

Tip 9: Write the First Draft

How to conduct research for your book: 9 tips that work.

If you’re like many first-time nonfiction writers, you’ve probably wondered, “How do I research for my book?”

I get this question a lot, and there are plenty of tips I can share. But before I dive into it, I’m going to throw you a curveball:

Don’t assume you have to do research for your book.

Because the purpose of nonfiction is to help the reader solve a problem or create change in their life (or both) by sharing what you know. If you can do this without a lot of research, then don’t do research.

We’ve had many Authors who knew their topic so inside and out that they didn’t need research. That is perfectly fine. They still wrote incredible books.

When it boils down to it, there are only 2 reasons to do research for your book:

• You know enough to write the book, but you want to add sources and citations to make the book more persuasive to a specific audience.
• You don’t know enough, and you need to learn more to make the book complete.

We’ve had many Authors who–despite knowing their stuff–wanted to include additional data, expert opinions, or testimonials to ensure that readers would find their arguments credible. This is important to consider if you’re writing for a scientific or technical audience that expects you to cite evidence.

Likewise, we see many Authors who know their industry but have a few knowledge gaps they’d like to fill in order to make their arguments more robust.

In fact, that’s the whole key to understanding how much research you should do. Ask yourself:

What evidence does a reader need to believe your argument is credible and trustworthy?

Research can be complicated, though. Many Authors don’t know where to start, and they get bogged down in the details. Which, of course, derails the book writing process and stalls them–or worse, it stops them from finishing.

The bad news? There’s no “right way” to make a book research plan.

The good news? The basic research tips apply for either person.

In this post, I’ll give you 9 effective research tips that will help you build a stronger, more convincing book.

More importantly, these tips will also show you how to get through the research process without wasting time.

9 Research Tips for Writing Your Book

Don’t jump into research blindly. Treat it like any other goal. Plan, set a schedule, and follow through.

Here are 9 tips that will help you research effectively.

Before you start researching or writing, you need to figure out two main things: your audience and your message.

This is called book positioning , and it’s an essential part of the book writing process.

Your job as an Author is to convince readers that your book will help them solve their problems.

Every piece of research you include in the book–whether it’s a survey, pie chart, or expert testimonial–should help you accomplish that.

Once your positioning is clear, you can put together your book outline.

Your outline is a comprehensive guide to everything in your book, and it is your best defense against procrastination, fear, and all the other problems writers face . It’s crucial if you don’t want to waste time on research you don’t need.

With an outline, you’ll already know what kind of data you need, where your information gaps are, and what kinds of sources might help you support your claims.

We’ve put together a free outline template to make the process even easier.

All this to say: without solid positioning and a comprehensive outline, you’ll wander. You’ll write, throw it away, write some more, get frustrated, and eventually, give up.

You’ll never finish a draft, much less publish your book .

If you don’t know your subject well enough to figure out your positioning and make a good outline, it means you don’t know enough to write that book—at least not right now.

Your plan will vary widely depending on whether you are:

• An expert who knows your field well
• Someone who needs to learn more about your field before writing about it

The majority of you are writing a book because you’re experts. So most of the information you need will already be in your head.

If you’re an expert, your research plan is probably going to be short, to the point, and about refreshing your memory or filling small gaps.

If you’re a non-expert, your research plan is probably going to be much longer. It could entail interviewing experts, reading lots of books and articles, and surveying the whole field you are writing about.

The outline should highlight those places where your book will need more information.

Are there any places where you don’t have the expertise to back up your claims?

What key takeaways require more evidence?

Would the book be stronger if you had another person’s point of view?

These are the kinds of gaps that research can fill.

Go back through your outline and find the places where you know you need more information. Next to each one, brainstorm ways you might fulfill that need.

For example, let’s say you’re writing a book that includes a section on yoga’s health benefits. Even if you’re a certified yoga instructor, you may not know enough physiology to explain the health benefits clearly.

Where could you find that information?

• Ask a medical expert
• A book on yoga and medicine
• A website that’s well respected in your field
• A study published in a medical journal

You don’t have to get too specific here. The point is to highlight where you need extra information and give yourself leads about where you might find it. ​

The kinds of research you need will vary widely, depending on what kind of nonfiction book you’re writing.

For example, if you’re giving medical advice for other experts, you’ll likely want to substantiate it with peer-reviewed, professional sources.

If you’re explaining how to grow a company, you might refer to statistics from your own company or recount specific anecdotes about other successful companies.

If you’re writing a memoir, you won’t need any quantitative data. You might simply talk with people from your past to fill in some gaps or use sources like Wikipedia to gather basic facts.

Different subject matter calls for different sources. If you’re having trouble figuring out what sources your subject needs, ask yourself the same question as above:

Ask yourself what evidence does a reader need to believe your argument is credible and trustworthy?

Generally speaking, an expert can do their research before they start writing, during, or even after (depending on what they need).

If you’re a non-expert, you should do your research before you start writing because what you learn will form the basis of the book.

It may sound obvious, but the internet is a powerful research tool and a great place to start. But proceed with caution: the internet can also be one of the greatest sources of misinformation.

If you’re looking for basic info, like for fact-checking, it’s fantastic.

If you’re looking for academic information, like scientific studies, it can be useful. (You might hit some paywalls, but the information will be there.)

If you’re looking for opinions, they’ll be abundant.

Chances are, though, as you look for all these things, you’re going to come across a lot of misleading sources—or even some that straight-up lie.

Here are some tips for making sure your internet research is efficient and effective:

• Use a variety of search terms to find what you need. For example, if you’re looking for books on childhood development, you might start with basic terms like “childhood development,” “child psychology,” or “social-emotional learning.”
• As you refine your knowledge, refine your searches. A second round of research might be more specific, like “Piaget’s stages of development” or “Erikson’s psychosocial theories.”
• Don’t just stop with the first result on Google. Many people don’t look past the first few results in a Google search. That’s fine if you’re looking for a recipe or a Wikipedia article, but the best research sources don’t always have the best SEO. Look for results that seem thorough or reputable, not just popular.
• Speaking of Wikipedia, don’t automatically trust it. It can be a great place to start if you’re looking for basic facts or references, but remember, it’s crowd-sourced. That means it’s not always accurate. Get your bearings on Wikipedia, then look elsewhere to verify any information you’re going to cite.
• Make sure your data is coming from a reputable source. Google Scholar, Google Books, and major news outlets like NPR, BBC, etc. are safe bets. If you don’t recognize the writer, outlet, or website, you’re going to have to do some digging to find out if you can trust them.
• Verify the credentials of the Author before you trust the site. People often assume that anything with a .edu domain is reputable. It’s not. You might be reading some college freshman’s last-minute essay on economics. If it’s a professor, you’re probably safe.

Using a few random resources from the internet is not equivalent to conducting comprehensive research.

If you want to dive deeper into a topic, books are often your best resources.

They’re reliable because they’re often fact-checked, peer-reviewed, or vetted. You know you can trust them.

Many Authors are directly influenced by other books in their field. If you’re familiar with any competing books, those are a great place to start.

Use the internet to find the best books in each field, and then dive into those.

Your book will have a different spin from the ones already out there, but think of it this way: you’re in the same conversation, which means you’ll probably have many of the same points of reference.

Check out the bibliographies or footnotes in those books. You might find sources that are useful for your own project.

You might want to buy the books central to your research. But if you aren’t sure if something’s going to be useful, hold off on hitting Amazon’s “one-click buy.”

Many Authors underestimate the power of their local libraries. Even if they don’t have the book you’re looking for, many libraries participate in extensive interlibrary loan programs. You can often have the books you need sent to your local branch.

Librarians are also indispensable research resources. Many universities have subject-specific research librarians who are willing to help you find sources, even if you aren’t a student.

Research doesn’t always require the internet or books. Sometimes you need an answer, story, or quotation from a real person.

But make sure you have a decent understanding of your field BEFORE you go to experts with your questions.

I’m an expert at writing nonfiction books, so I speak from personal experience. It’s annoying as hell when people come to you with questions without having done at least a little research on the topic beforehand—especially when you already have a 3,000 word blog post about it.

Experts love it when you’ve done some research and can speak their language. They hate it when you ask them to explain fundamentals.

But once you find a good expert, it condenses your learning curve by at least 10x.

To figure out who you need to talk to, think about the kind of nonfiction book you’re writing.

Is it a book about your own business, products, or methods? You may want to include client stories or testimonials.

In Driven , Doug Brackmann relied on his experience with clients to teach highly driven people how to master their gifts.

Is it a book that requires expert knowledge outside your own area of expertise (for example, a doctor, IT specialist, lawyer, or business coach)? You might want to ask them to contribute brief passages or quotations for your book.

Colin Dombroski did exactly that for his book The Plantar Fasciitis Plan . He consulted with various colleagues, each of whom contributed expert advice for readers to follow.

It’s much easier to contact people who are already in your network. If you don’t personally know someone, ask around. Someone you already know may be able to connect you with the perfect expert.

If that doesn’t work out, you can always try the cold call method. Send a polite email that briefly but clearly explains what your book is about and why you’re contacting them.

If you do this, though, do your research first. Know the person’s name. Don’t use “To whom it may concern.” Know their specialty. Know exactly what type of information you’re seeking. Basically, know why they are the person you want to feature in your book.

Some Authors like to collect surveys for their books. This is very optional, and it’s only applicable in certain books, so don’t assume you need this.

But if you want to include a section in your book that includes how people feel about something (for example, to back up a point you’re making), you might want to have survey data.

You might have access to data you can already cite. The internet is full of data: infographics, Pew data, Nielsen ratings, scholarly research, surveys conducted by private companies.

If you don’t have access to data, you can conduct your own surveys with an online platform like SurveyMonkey. Here’s how:

• Consider your research goals. What are you trying to learn?
• Formulate the survey questions. Most people prefer short, direct survey questions. They’re also more likely to answer multiple-choice questions.
• Invite participants. If you want a reliable survey, it’s best to get as many participants as possible. Surveying three family members won’t tell you much.
• Collect and analyze the data.

That will work for more informal purposes, but surveys are a science unto themselves. If you require a lot of data, want a large sample size, or need high statistical accuracy, it’s better to hire pros. Quantitative data is more effective and trustworthy when it’s properly conducted.

Don’t go overboard with statistics, though. Not all books need quantitative data. There are many other ways to convince readers to listen to your message.

Organize your research as you go. I can’t stress this enough.

If you research for months on end, you might end up with dozens of articles, quotations, or anecdotes. That’s a lot of material.

If you have to dig through every single piece when you want to use something, it’ll take you years to write.

Don’t rely on your memory, either. Three months down the line, you don’t want to ask, “Where did I find this piece of information?” or “Where did that quotation come from?”

I suggest creating a research folder on your computer where you collect everything.

Inside the main folder, create subfolders for each individual chapter (or even each individual subsection of your chapters). This is where your outline will come in handy.

In each folder, collect any pdfs, notes, or images relevant to that section.

Every time you download or save something, give the file a clear name.

Immediately put it into the correct folder. If you wait, you might not remember which part of your book you found it useful for.

Also, be sure to collect the relevant citation information:

• Author’s name
• Title of the book, article, etc.
• The outlet it appeared in (e.g., BBC or Wired) or, if it’s a book, the publisher
• The date it was published
• The page number or hyperlink

If you have photocopies or handwritten notes, treat them the same way. Label them, file them, and add the necessary citation information. This will save you a lot of time when you sit down to write.

Some Authors use programs like Scrivener or Evernote to keep track of their research. I personally use the software program Notion, which is similar to Evernote.

These programs allow you to collect references, notes, images, and even drafts, all in one convenient place.

They save you from having to create your own digital organizational system. They also make it easier to consult documents without opening each file individually.

Once you’ve got a system in place, don’t forget: back up your data. Put it on the cloud, an external hard drive, or both. There’s nothing worse than spending hours on research just to have it disappear when your computer crashes.

All of this takes time, and it may seem tedious. But trust me, it’s a lot more tedious when you’re racing toward your publication deadline, and you’re hunting down random data you quoted in your book.

Tip 8: Set a Deadline & Stop Early

Research is one of the most common ways Authors procrastinate.

When they’re afraid of writing or hit roadblocks, they often say, “Well, I just need to do a little more research…”

Fast-forward two years, and they’re still stuck in the same spiral of self-doubt and research.

Don’t fall into that trap. Learn when to stop.

When I’m writing, I set a research deadline and then stop EARLY. It’s a great way to beat procrastination , and it makes me feel like I’m ahead of the curve.

Here’s the thing: there’s always going to be more information out there. You could keep researching forever.

But then you’d never finish the book—which was the point of the research in the first place.

Plus, excessive research doesn’t make better books . No one wants to read six test cases when one would have worked.

You want to have enough data to convincingly make your case, but not so much that your readers get bogged down by all the facts.

So how will you know when you’ve done enough?

When you have enough data, anecdotes, and examples to address every point on your outline.

Your outline is your guide. Once it’s filled in, STOP .

Remember, the goal of data is to support your claims. You’re trying to make a case for readers, not bludgeon them with facts.

If you feel like you have to go out of your way to prove your points, you have 1 of 2 problems:

• You’re not confident enough in your points, or
• You’re not confident enough in your readers’ ability to understand your claims.

If you’re having the first problem, you may need to go back and adjust your arguments. All the research in the world won’t help support a weak claim.

If you’re having the second problem, ask yourself, If I knew nothing about this subject, what would it take to convince me? Follow through on your answer and trust that it’s enough.

When you think you have enough research, start writing your vomit draft.

If it turns out you’re missing small pieces of information, that’s okay. Just make a note of it. Those parts are easy to go back and fill in later.

Notice: I said “later.” Once you start writing, stop researching.

If you stop writing your first draft to look for more sources, you’ll break the flow of your ideas.

Research and writing are two completely different modes of thinking. Most people can’t switch fluidly between them.

Just get the first draft done.

Remember, the first draft is exactly that—the first draft. There will be many more versions in the future.

It’s okay to leave notes to yourself as you go along. Just be sure to leave yourself a way to find them easily later.

I recommend changing the font color or highlighting your comments to yourself in the draft. You can even use different colors: one for missing data and another for spots you need to fact-check.

You can also use the “insert comment” feature on Microsoft Word, Google Docs, or any other writing software you prefer.

Another useful tip is to simply type “TK.” There’s no word in the English language where those two letters appear together. That means, when you’re ready to go back through your draft, you can use the “Find” option (Control+F). It will take you back to all the spots you marked.

Whatever method you choose, don’t stop writing.

Also, don’t worry about how “good” or “bad” it is at this point. No one ever wrote an amazing first draft. Not even bestselling Authors.

Just keep at it until you have a complete first draft.

That won’t be hard because you won’t be missing any huge pieces. The whole point of the outline was to zero in on exactly what you want to write for the exact audience you want to reach. If you followed that outline when you researched, you’ll be able to stay on track during the writing process.

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How To Research Your Novel – A Step-By-Step Guide

Are you ready to start your novel? Do you want to make it believable? Not all stories are scientifically sound, but even ones with magic or set in futuristic worlds have a sense of reality that captures their readers. Research is a major part of making any story feel life-like, but it isn’t always easy to know where to start. This guide will show you how!

How to begin researching

Before you start, you need to decide the overall theme or topic of your novel. Do you want to share a life lesson? Do you want to capture a sense of horror? Maybe you want to tell a story about a relationship or a historical event. 

You might have an idea what you want to write about already. Whether you do or not, take a moment to ask yourself these questions:

What kind of story do I want to tell?

Is it centered around a real-world experience?

Will it be set in a fictional world or reality?

What genre will it fall in?

Who is your target audience?

Who are the main characters?

If you have all of the answers for these already, great job! But if not, don’t worry. You don’t need them all just yet. You will find the answers as you continue through this guide. 

Let’s take the questions one at a time.

This focuses on the theme or topic of your story. It could also mean the atmosphere – is this a comfort story? Something to disturb your readers? Something to provoke thought? 

Maybe you want to talk about the effects of pent up thoughts to the human psyche. Or perhaps you want to share a comedic allegory. Whatever it may be, it is what will make your story a story.

Take some time and look at your favorite films, TV series, and novels. What do you love so much about them? What are they about? What message do they tell? Do you see a common theme between them? 

Use this information to decide where you’d like your own story to go.

This could be anything from a small interaction you had with someone to a historical event. 

While that sounds like it only applies to non-fiction novels, it doesn’t have to. A real-world experience can be translated into an essence or idea – for example, Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game is about military strategy and economic tensions between humans and an alien race, but it is inspired by Cold War tensions between the U.S. and Soviet Union after WWII.

You get to decide. 

Are you the type of person who finds a setting is essential to the story, and loves reading about details of places in books? Do you like the idea of making up your own cultures, norms, or an alternative society? If yes, fictional world-building might just be your thing.

If you prefer to keep it in the real world, keep in mind the time period* and location you are aiming for. Placing a smartphone in 1854 wouldn’t work, unless you were writing alternative historical fiction.

On that note, you can also place your story in the “real world” but make changes yourself. Many stories include cities and towns that don’t actually exist. Others are inspired by real places. Veronica Roth’s Divergent series is placed in a dystopian version of Chicago, Illinois – completely unrecognizable from the real city.

*If you do choose to write historical fiction, spend some time researching the years your story will span. Focus on the customs, beliefs, and lifestyles people had back then. Take lots of notes. Set up a timeline of events to help guide your story. Feel free to reach out to experts for specific questions or even read a diary or two from someone who lived during that time.

This question might not be answered until you’ve completed your novel. It can be tricky. There are so many options to choose from, and many niches and subgenres.

If you run into trouble defining which genre your story actually falls into, take a look at genre descriptions like this one for more information. If your story contains elements of multiple genres, select the one it has the most of as the one to define it, or research if there is a subgenre that combines them. 

Maybe you want to have this answered before you even start. In that case, look at genre charts now and understand what types of themes and characters occur in each one. This will help you get an idea of what kind of conflict your story will have, what the characters will be like, and what your audience will expect.

Your target audience goes hand-in-hand with your chosen genre. Are you trying to attract mystery-lovers? Horror enthusiasts?

But it also includes certain demographics. Are you writing romance for middle-aged, single women? Self-help for college students? Moral lessons for tweens? 

Select an age range that might be interested in your story. Then, break it down into more demographics if necessary – occupation, interests, income level. 

You don’t want to write a novel about your fixer-upper journey and how you became debt-free at the age of 32 for retired millionaires. That would be for young adults (just-graduated high school students entering the workforce, college students, young newlyweds) looking to gain independence, buy their first house, pay off loans, and start a new hobby or source of income.

Write down each character and start defining who they are – their personalities, their motivations, their conflicts. 

It may help you to do a quick Google search for character charts . They are often a good character-building practice and can help guide you when you feel lost.  Many of them include details you won’t need in your novel, but they can help you get to know your characters better.

A good reader will notice when there are unseen details about your characters that they might not know, but you do. Whether you realize it or not, those details will bleed into your story. They make your characters feel much more alive.

Continuing your research

As you dive into the details of your story, you’ll want to make sure the information you collect is accurate, relevant, and from trustworthy sources.

When conducting your research, be sure to use reputable sources and cross-reference your facts. This can be especially important for a work of historical fiction, science fiction, or even fantasy. 

Get in contact with an expert – not only will they give you useful information and confirm details, but they can offer a different perspective. If one of your characters is a geologist, talking to a geologist and getting their opinion on your character wouldn’t hurt. 

When you’re ready, have other people read your novel and ask them for feedback. You do a lot while writing – you won’t catch everything on your own. Readers can help you find any plot holes or inaccuracies.

Writing a novel can be hard work and it’s easy to fall into a rabbit hole while learning about new and interesting things. You can make sure you stay on track while gathering information by setting up a timeline or map of your research. Take lots of notes and write down the source of any information you gather to reference back to later.

Start with your characters. Follow a character chart to learn about their personalities, goals, and motivations. The more you understand your characters, the easier it will be to tailor your research to their stories. Then, move on to your setting. Know the location, the climate, the culture. These details will help you fill in your own story and you gather more information.

Trustworthy

You don’t want to have false facts in your story. To get the most out of your research, consider looking at primary sources like diaries, newspaper articles, or interviews with people who experienced something first-hand or are an expert in their field. You can also find credible secondary sources in books, research papers, videos, and even blog posts.

Researching a believable novel

After following these steps, your novel should be believable. The key is relevancy. 

For example, if you’re writing a crime novel, look into the criminal justice system. Interview a judge or a police officer. Read up on past crimes to study criminal patterns. Read reports from psychologists to learn different mindsets and apply them to a character. 

Focus on your characters and setting, and conduct your research based on what you know about them. Be open to asking questions and always learning more.

And most importantly, have fun with it!

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How to research for a book: 9 ways to prepare well

Deciding how to research for a book is a personal process, with much depending on your subject. Read 9 tips on how to research a novel:

• Post author By Jordan
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How to research for a book: Scope, process, tools

• Define the scope of research
• List headline research you’ll need
• Do a ‘quick and dirty’ search
• Lean on .edu and library resources
• Speak to pros and specialists
• Shadow an expert if applicable
• Read authors on how to research a book
• Have a system for storing research
• Stop when you have enough to write

1. Define the scope of research

Research for a novel easily gets out of hand. You’re writing about Tudor England, for example. The next thing you know you’ve read every doorstop ever written about Anne Boleyn.

Define the scope of research you need to do, first.

This is particularly crucial if you’re new to researching novels.

‘Scope creep’ (where the task becomes bigger and bigger, and the focus dimmer) is a common challenge in research.

If, for example, you’re writing a novel featuring the Tudors (rulers of England between 1485 and 1603), ask questions such as:

• What duration within this era will my story span? (e.g. ‘the last five years of Henry VIII’s life’)
• What information is vital to know? If, for example, you’re writing about a monarch firing a particular associate, this will narrow down your research
• What broad picture elements do I need? (For example, a timeline of key background social or political events within a historical period)

Narrow down what you need to learn to the essentials necessary to begin writing.

2. List headline research you’ll need

Once you know the scope of your research, list the big, main events and subjects you’ll need to cover.

For a historical figure subject like Henry VIII, you might have a list of research to do like this:

• Timeline of major events in the king’s life
• Personality – accounts of what the king was like
• Appearance – descriptions of what the king looked like
• Controversy – king’s many wives, execution of Anne Boleyn, etc.

Make a document with a section per each of the core areas of the story you’ll need to research.

Populate these sections with article snippets, links to educational resources.

(Google, for example ‘Henry VIII reign .edu’ to find information from credible learning institutions.)

3. Do a ‘quick and dirty’ search

In learning how to research for a book, learn how to work smart, not hard. Research the way a student with an assignment hand-in due the next day would, to start.

Use Wikipedia (a no-no in academia). You can find broad information and an idea of what to look for to verify and fact-check later on .edu and library websites , or in physical book copies.

Search amateur history blogs, too. There are many subject enthusiasts who have devoted hours to digging up interesting historical and other information and share their learnings for free in blog articles.

If you’re writing about a real place, use Google Maps to do a street-view virtual tour. You can explore cities you’ve never been to before. Read more more on researching place when you are unable to get there.

Note details to include in scene-setting and worldbuilding such as specific landmarks and architectural details.

Get a professional edit

A good editor will help pinpoint major factual inaccuracies and other issues.

4. Lean on .edu and library resources

When deciding how to research for a book, whether it’s fiction or non-fiction, favour credible resources.

You can even find fantastic primary source scans and recordings. Some examples of excellent, free online research resources:

• British Pathé : Pathé News, a producer of newsreels and documentaries from 1910 to 1970 in the UK has a rich and varied archive. It includes original footage (trigger warning: disturbing footage of aircraft explosion) of the Hindenburg Disaster.
• Tudor History: Historical .org websites such as this website on the Tudors provide a wealth of research information .
• The Smithsonian has regular online webinars, exhibitions and more where you can learn about a diverse range of natural history topics from experts.

If online research feels overwhelming, consider taking a course in online research skills.

The University of Toronto also put together this thorough list of questions to guide doing research online .

5. Speak to pros and specialists

Learning how to research a novel is made much easier by experts who are happy to share their knowledge.

If you are researching a specific place, language, historical figure, biological or medical issue or another detail, make a list of experts to reach out to.

Explain your fiction or non-fiction project and why you’d value their insights. You’ll be surprised how many are only too happy to contribute accurate, informed knowledge.

You can also find specialist knowledge in online forums devoted to specific subjects.

6. Shadow an expert if applicable

There’s no single ‘right way’ in how to research for a book.

You could take a leaf out of the method actor’s book, for example, and actually job shadow an expert [ Ed note: Once COVID no longer sets stringent limits on contact ].

Depending on the subject or industry, you may have variable degrees of success. For example, shadowing a medical professional has other issues involved, such as patient privacy/confidentiality.

In a roundtable discussion on preparing for roles, British actress Vanessa Kirby described job-shadowing on an obstetrics ward to research a role. Because she had never had a child herself, she wanted to give an authentic performance of a woman in labour (around the 18:15 timestamp).

Writing is very much like acting in this respect: You need to be able to fill in the blanks in your own imagination to prepare.

7. Read authors on how to research for books

In deciding how to research for a book, one also needs to decide how/where to use (or alter) source material. It’s helpful to read authors who write historical fiction and other research-heavy genres. What do they say about process?

Hilary Mantel, for example says this about taking creative license with historical facts:

History is a process, not a locked box with a collection of facts inside. The past and present are always in dialogue – there can hardly be history without revisionism. Hilary Mantel: ‘History is a process, not a locked box’, via The Guardian

8. Have a system for storing research

Research for a book easily becomes cluttered.

How do you keep research tidy and manageable, so that you have the information you need when you need it?

Organise your research for a novel with these apps and tools:

• Google Docs: Outline mode creates a clickable outline of your document in a left-hand panel – perfect for jumping between different categories of research.
• Evernote: This handy app makes it easy to snip bits of articles from your browser into collections to sort and store.
• Sytem folders: Create a folder on your operating system for your project, and subfolders for each research topic.
• Novel Novel Dashboard: You can also fill out character profiles and other prompts on Now Novel using historical sources (see an example below).

9. Stop when you have enough to write

In deciding how to research for a book, it’s important to set a stop point.

Ask yourself how much you really need to begin writing. Need to know what would have been served at a royal dinner in the year 1600? Make a note to add this detail later and describe the details of the occasion you can make up to keep going with your draft.

Balancing research and writing will ensure your research is fit to its purpose – finishing your book with relevant and precise detail.

Need help researching your book? Watch our webinar on writing research (and enjoy future live webinars and Q&A sessions too) when you subscribe to a Now Novel plan.

Related Posts:

• 5 easy ways to research your novel
• Historical fiction: 7 elements of research
• Book ideas: 12 fun ways to find them
• Tags how to research your novel

Jordan is a writer, editor, community manager and product developer. He received his BA Honours in English Literature and his undergraduate in English Literature and Music from the University of Cape Town.

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How to research a novel: the 7 most up-to-date tips

Much of the advice available on researching novels is now dated. So this blog post includes the best modern tips on how to research fiction, with a case study included.

There I’ll show you step-by-step how I used the tools described below to construct a chapter in one of my novels. Once you’ve read through the tips and the Case Study  you can even jump here  to preview an ebook version of the completed product, which will give you a chance to assess how effective these tips are.

But first, for those who like to skim, let’s sum up the 7 basic pieces of advice on novel research.

How to research a novel

• Use Pinterest as you research your novel by building a  visual reference guide
• Use tools like Google Street View to add a  dash of realism  to descriptions
• Wikipedia is good for researching cultures, places and times for  historical novels
• Use  Instagram hashtags  to research specific locations in your novel
• You can use your  dreams  as a research tool!
• Remember to  step through the screen as you research
• Post questions on Quora and Reddit to tap the real  experience of strangers

1. Use Pinterest when researching your novel

Pinterest isn’t just great for collecting ideas for your next bathroom renovation or helping you find a really great bridesmaids dress – it’s also an invaluable tool for fiction writers looking to build a mental picture of what they’ll write about.

The key to Pinterest is that it’s a visual medium. So what you’re doing when using Pinterest to research a novel is  collating images that will enrich your mental picture of the world you’re writing . The visual side of what you write is really important, and collecting images into Pinterest boards will give your imagination a real boost.

Tip:  the best advice here is to go all-in on Pinterest. If you use it half-heartedly you run the risk of being excessively influenced by one or two images. But if you invest the time in collecting lots of diverse images that inform each part of your upcoming novel, then it’s more likely that the visuals that you write into the book will be greater than the sum of the parts that inspired them. So go for it: create some boards and start pinning picture that you find.

How to build a visual reference guide with Pinterest

There are two way you can approach Pinterest for novel research. The simplest is just to create a Pinterest account for yourself (or use your current one) then have it on hand as you browse the net so that you can pin images that inspire you as you stumble across them. The other more proactive way is to spend time researching in order to build a visual reference guide for each part of your book. To do this create boards for each aspect of your book that you feel needs more visual input – then search (both inside Pinterest and out) to build a visual library of images that speak to you. You can then refer back to these when writing to help spark your creativity.

Use Pinterest to create a mood board for each chapter

You can also collate images in Pinterest when researching your novel simply to help put your finger on a particular mood. A mood board for Bram Stoker’s Dracula, for instance, might include a board entirely filled with images of crumbling castles. But it could also include a mood board filled with photos of Romanian peasant village life to inform other scenes, and boards with images of upper-class Victorian life for the scenes that take place in London.

Use Pinterest to create a visual guide for each character

Drawing a blank when you try to picture an important character? Don’t stress. Just jump on Google Images and search all of the phrases that you have for your character. Are they tall, dark and brooding – Google that! Now look through any images that gel with what you had in mind and add them to the relevant board. Then rinse and repeat. By the end you’ll have a great sense of how your character looks.

2. Use Google products to research your novel

As the Google suite of products has expanded, so too have the tools available to authors. Don’t overlook the research techniques that Google now puts at your disposal.

Measure distance and travel times

When  Character A  needs to get to  Location B  it can help – if you’re writing in the real world, rather than a fantasy location – to ask Google for directions, in order to get a realistic sense of travel times. Writing about a road trip that you haven’t actually taken yourself? Avoid alienating readers that know the place by getting your distances and details right. And when it gets really crucial you can even use a point-to-point measuring tool in Google Maps by right clicking with you mouse on the map. That sniper shot across New York’s Central Park in your latest thriller is going to be that much more realistic when you know the space is exactly 845 metres wide.

Use Google Street View for flashes of veracity

Another great tip is dropping the little yellow figure on to the map to see exactly what any given street looks like from street level. You can really lift a scene – especially one set in a real place that you’ve never been to – by having your character note landmarks that are actually there. Maybe have them reflect on a church, or a distinctive building – or even notice some street art on a mural. Google Street View will help you add this layer of authenticity.

Find real shops and restaurants for particular scenes

In a similar vein to the point above, you can also easily set key scenes in real places with a little internet research. This can be a neat way to add veracity to a book, but it’s also a good way to step beyond your own visual limitations. What I mean is that you probably have a fairly straightforward scene in your head if you were to picture a generic cafe or restaurant – so by finding a real place online, you can really freshen a scene with a dose of reality. Top tip: menus are generally available via Google too!

Install Google Keep on your phone for taking notes on the go

Researching books isn’t just about collecting facts, it’s about having enough impressions and ideas to bring your scenes and characters – and their thoughts – to life for a reader. So if you see something unusual or striking in your day-to-day, jot it down and have your character notice it themselves in some scene, for that extra dash of realism. A notebook and pen in your back pocket is ideal for this – but better still is installing  Google Keep on your phone so you can take your notes down there. You can organise them into handy sections, they’ll be automatically backed up to the cloud, and you can even record voice notes for when you’re on the move.

Use baby name databases for character names

There are a lot of internet baby name databases designed to help parents choose a moniker for bubs – and most include the meaning and origin of each name, which is very helpful if you want your character names to resonate with your themes. Have a strong female Middle Eastern character? Find an Arabic woman’s name that means ‘brave’. Or you can easily do a little Googling to find out, for example, what working class men’s names were popular in Victorian England. After all you cockney jewel thief main character won’t ring true when he is called Tarquin or Eustace if real cockneys of the time were called Frankie or Bill.

3. Use Wikipedia to research places and cultures for historical novels

Wikipedia is an invaluable tool for historical novelists. Its accounts of various historic periods, places, people, cultures and religions are a veritable rabbit hole that you can fall down, with convenient hyper-links to each related topic. Just be sure to copy out the parts that are most useful, so you don’t lose them as you venture deeper in…

4. Use Instagram to research places for your novel

Instagram is naturally a useful resource when building a mood board for any given character or scene (see the tips on using Pinterest above) but perhaps its greatest use for novelists planning a book is in helping authors visualise places that they’ve never been. Travel photographers here are a goldmine. Simply search for a certain location or place by hashtag, and follow anyone who regularly posts from that place for a steady stream of genuine visuals. For instance when researching for  my young adult series set near Afghanistan and Iran  I found a series of fantastic young Iranian photographers who regular posted pics that totally expanded my awareness of what those places really look like.

5. Use your dreams as a research tool

Okay here I’m not talking about your deepest wishes and desires – I’m talking about your actual nighttime dreams. These are a tremendous resource of material for any work of fiction and, unlike all of the internet research resources listed above, your dreams are utterly unique to you. If you’re lucky enough to have good dream recall, then get in the habit of jotting down in a notepad beside your bed what you can remember when you wake. If you do that before they fade you’ll find them invaluable material for any creative work – especially novels.

6. Remember to step through the screen

Okay, hopefully you’re finding these tips useful, but before we go on let’s remember one important thing. The internet has no smell and it doesn’t have a sense of touch. So there’s a real risk when you research a novel that the material you uncover is one-dimensional. Remember, your job as a writer is to make people  feel  an experience, not simply visualise or think about it. So be sure to step through the computer screen when you research and try to imagine what the things you are finding out about actually feel like in real life.

7. Use Quora and Reddit to research your novel

Quora and Reddit are online communities where you’ll get great traction by posting questions  – so they’re another great tool for fiction research, especially on hard facts like ‘How far can a soldier march in one night?’ or ‘What’s the maximum operating altitude for a hot air ballon?’. And because those communities are full of random experts in all sorts of curious corners of knowledge, you can tap them for specialist details that you simply can’t source elsewhere: ‘What rights did women have in 17th Century Spain?’ perhaps (for those historical novelists again), or ‘What was considered elderly in Viking culture?’.

Top tip:  identify these questions early on and post them at the start of your research journey to give people time to respond.

Use Quora and Reddit for the feels

Most importantly though, unlike any of the other research tools above, you can use these platforms to find out what an experience is actually  like . Be sure to ask things like ‘What does it feel like being in your first firefight?’ or ‘What’s it like being swept up by an avalanche?’. This is the kind of level of realism that can make your novel shine.

Some Dos and Don’ts when researching a novel

To wrap up this part of what has hopefully been a useful post – and before we get in to a  Case Study  that gives an actual example of how this sort of research can play out, let’s look at some final dos and don’ts of the novel research game:

• Do  use internet research to spark your imagination.
• Don’t  use internet research to just assemble a collection of other people’s ideas.
• Do  let research morph into actual writing. You need to take your inspiration where it comes.
• Don’t  forget to back up your research (and manuscript). A simple upload to a free cloud service like Google Drive will save you heartache when your laptop harddrive fries or you leave it on the train.
• Do  store your research in one place. Even a simple word doc with links at the start to all relevant social media accounts (e.g. Pinterest, Quora) followed by notes broken into sections will do.
• Do  use your local library – but as a last resort. A physical trip there is likely a waste of your time, however pleasant. Find out what books you want to borrow by searching online, then order them through your library’s website.

Case study: Researching a novel in the age of Google

One of the things that only strikes you about writing a book  after  you’ve sat down and started is how crucial it is to write from immediate experience. It can be a real struggle to describe something you haven’t seen, smelled, heard and observed personally – and to stop it being a hollow and phoney reduction of other books and movies you’ve digested. Anyone who reads it is likely to sniff out that it’s phoney right away, and biff the book.

With this in mind, I thought I’d describe the process of writing a fiction chapter entirely via Google products – Google Maps, Streetview, Earth and Images – plus some extra research on Wikipedia.

It’s something that should have sounded a death knell for the chapter in question – but in this case, I think it worked. In fact, it’s probably my favourite out of the whole 87,000 word novel. (For those interested in seeing how using this approach played out, the chapter in question can be found in  Effra, A Novel  here)

It was a funny passage though. I decided to write it at a point where almost everything in the book had been planned. I had the logic of the plot and the themes and the development of the main characters all planned out in a kind of delicate arrangement (it only lacked a finale – that would come later). In my head it looked like a model of DNA – different threads wrapping around each other, all building towards a greater purpose. And I was pretty pleased with that image, because for a LONG time it had looked like a ball of wool that a cat’s played with. But then something funny happened. I’d sorted the logic of what happened and why and to whom – and the excitement died.

It felt like any reader who was familiar with basic story-telling would feel they were being hurried to a foregone conclusion. I was being careful to write a tight story, one without a lot of fat in it, but as a consequence you could see the bones. You could sense the logic. The story felt  inevitable  – and because it felt inevitable, it was no longer exciting. I’m a big believer in the reader providing at least half the story – after all,  you  make the pictures in your head,  you  provide the emotion – but a reader who feels like a story is inevitable, gets bored. Why should you care about a story that doesn’t let you play along, that seems intent on having things march along the way  it  wants, and expects you to just tag along for the ride?

So I decided to write something that would let the story breathe. Something completely pointless, that the reader would enjoy reading and I would enjoy writing (I think those two flow into each other): I sent my main characters on holiday.

Just for a short one – a train trip to the countryside for a day. The sort of thing I had done dozens of times from London. And anyway, I needed my characters to get close, and holidays are one way that happens. Perhaps by the time I finished the chapter, sparks would appear…

But where to go? This is where technology came in. I was writing about a trip out of London from a desk in suburban Auckland, and I wasn’t about to hop on a plane for research reasons, the way ‘real’ writers should. I had to do it over the net.

I needed them to visit a town a few hours, max, from London. It had to be on a train line – the characters had no car. It had to be small. And it had to be pretty.

I loaded Google Maps.

From London I scrolled around in a circle, and found the main train lines. Traced along the lines until I found towns – hunting for a small one somewhere nice. Sussex? Surrey? Kent… Kent would be good. Down the line I went, ’til I found Wye.

Well Wye not? Did it look nice? Up came Google Earth, I found the place and zoomed in – trees, fields, a line of hills – it was perfect. But what the hell was that?

The town had looked the right size, so using the tilt tool I’d raised the horizon up to a person’s perspective. That way I could see the place in the same way my characters would. I moved Google Earth to the train station where they’d disembark – and form their first impressions – and hit the 3D button for extra realism.

Up came the hills (or downs, rather), only to reveal a strange symbol carved in chalk – which would be visible from where they’d be standing.

This was perfect. My book had a theme of old things coming up through the surface of the modern – so this seemed like a gift from the gods. I would research what this strange symbol was via Wikipedia, and have my characters check it out as part of their day trip. Done.

Incidentally, anyone who’s read the book or this chapter will probably realise that the process of researching it matches closely to how the narrative evolves. The two characters start off not knowing where to go – they roll out a (real) map – choose the place, then pile out of the station and spot the carved chalk symbol. Everything they do just rolled out of the process of researching the town of Wye over a few days, and I wrote it as I went.

From the station I had them walk up the hill to the carved symbol, then I realised they would soon need some lunch. Out came Google Earth again – I needed to find them a pub. On Google Earth I spotted the next small town over (Crundale I think), and using the distance measure tool, I worked out that it was realistically walkable. Then I switched to Google Maps to get closer. That looked like a pub… I switched to Google Streetview and confirmed it – went back to Google Search to find the pub’s name, and had them walk over there across the downs. Phew.

Hey but what did those downs look like from ground level? At that point I started searching Google images for “Crundale” and “Wye” and found this idyllic shot of people walking between the two towns.

Perfect. What a relaxing image. It had exactly the feel I’d wanted to create in this chapter in the first place – that drifting holiday looseness. So where was the image from? Oh – the website of walking club for older gay men. Ha! And now that I looked closer at the people making their way down the hill, I realised I had a minor character in the making…

The portly gent in the floppy hat seemed just right. Plus, in all this research, I’d stumbled across the fact that Wye and Crundale are hotspots for rare English meadow butterflies. I imagined the gay walker in the photo as an amateur lepidopterist, and the character at the pub, David, was born.

I could go on and on about this chapter – actually I already have – so I’ll cut it short and just say that the whole experience generated a lot of writers luck. The butterfly thing matched with a mention I’d made in the book already; one of the streets in Wye had the same spooky name as a local Brixton lane; I’ve already mentioned the chalk carving: the whole thing just flowed and I wrote at top speed for two days. By the time I got my characters back home to London they, and I, were exhausted and the chapter’s ending – the sparks I’d hoped might be there – they just fell in to place naturally.

So to sum it up – and I’d like to hear what you think on this too – I reckon writing from internet research is dangerous.

For one thing, the internet doesn’t smell (except maybe if you pick that crud out of your mousewheel; I’m not sniffing that – and you shouldn’t either). It doesn’t have breezes or seasons, or move between dawn and dusk – there’s just one constant, backlit ever-day. In short, it’s not tactile in the ways I think you should draw on when writing. And on top of that, the experiences you do have are through someone else. You experience via someone else’s words, camera, website, Google-van, satellite, whatever – seeing things in a way they’ve been seen before – and I think you risk that derivative quality creeping into your writing.

Yet I like how my chapter came out.

And hell, the internet is incredibly powerful – you can get a street view of almost any place in the world, for crying out loud, without spending your life savings flying round the world researching like a ‘real’ writer. So I think that as a literary research tool, it’s here to stay.

But I think it’s crucial that when you use these tools you blend the things you gather with real experiences you’ve had –things that you’ve smelled, seen and thought – or you risk it coming out flat and flavourless.

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How to Do Research for a Novel

By Georgina Roy

Whatever genre of novel you’re writing, it’s highly likely you’ll need to carry out some research. In this post, we explain how to do research for a novel.

1. Know what you need to research

Before you embark on doing research specifically for your novel, you should have decided about:

• The genre (contemporary, historical, romance, science fiction, fantasy);
• The characters (their ages, profession, a summarized biography);
• The plots and the subplots.

Making those decisions prior to doing any research will enable you to know what precisely you need to research. Otherwise, you will end up combing through a lot of information without any direction. In turn, this will probably lead you to spend way too much on the research process and delay the actual writing of the novel.

For example, let’s say that you want to write a historical fiction novel set in the Medieval era. Unless you specifically decide on the century and year(s) the novel is set in, you will be combing through centuries of information needlessly.

In another example, let’s say that you wish to write a fantasy novel inspired by the Mesopotamian era. Instead of choosing a century, here you will have to research the whole era very thoroughly and decide how you are going to build the fantasy world in your novel.

2. Organize all the information

At its core, researching a certain topic/time period for a novel means sifting through a lot of information and determining what information is relevant to you. Because of that, you should prepare how you will organize the information that you will determine is important for your novel.

The easiest way to organize is to create folders (both paper and electronically on your computer), and label them with Plot, Subplots,  Characters , Worldbuilding. In each folder, you will keep the information you need in relation to the name of the folder.

Further divisions and folders would depend on the plans you have for your novel. You can have a subfolder for the protagonist, then major characters, then minor characters. In your Plot folder, if you are writing a murder mystery novel, for example, you might have a subfolder titled Crime, Murder weapon, and so forth.

Keeping all the information you determine as relevant divided and organized will help you to be able to easily find any details during the writing process. In the folders, you can also include anything from pictures, to videos, to text that you determine is important.

3. Research the genre

Each genre has its own tropes, stereotypes, expected storylines, and general markings. For example, a romance novel needs to have a happy ending (either happy for now or a happily ever after). A science fiction novel needs to be based on science that has advanced but in a realistic manner.

For example, in the Golden Age of science fiction in early to mid-twentieth century, when nuclear power was just being discovered, a lot of science fiction authors of the time used nuclear power for just about anything in their stories, from faster-than-light travel, to weapons and personal shields. Such use wouldn’t stand as scientific today when we know the ramifications of nuclear power, the ensuing radiation, and the consequences of using it.

There are sources on the internet, most notably the  TV tropes website  where you can research the tropes, clichés, and stereotypes of just about any genre, and you can also see how these tropes appear in all sorts of media, from novels to movies, TV shows, anime and manga, comic books, and more.

Knowing the tropes (character types, clichés, stereotypes, plot lines, etc.) of the genre you wish to write in will help you to provide a more original take on said tropes (or clichés, etc.) and make your novel more original, by presenting your own interpretation of the same.

4. Carry out psychology research

Psychology research is a basic due diligence type of research that you need to do in order to create believable characters. We are all shaped, one way or another, by our upbringing and our experiences in life, and the same applies to your characters. The way a character has been raised in their formative years will have an effect on who they are when the novel starts, but it will also have an effect on how they develop over the course of the novel.

Beyond this, there is also the possibility that you might wish to tackle a difficult topic in your novel – like the consequences of trauma of any kind, from loss, to grief, to more difficult topics like abuse and rape. Doing research in psychology will enable you to create more realistic characters in terms of how they react to the traumatic event, as well as how they deal with it.

Otherwise, you might end up creating characters that have had certain life experiences that should have shaped them in a certain way, and yet they act completely differently. For example, someone who was orphaned at a young age not showing any signs as an adult of abandonment issues. Or, an even worse case, when for example, a character has been kidnapped, abused, and kept in a room for more than a decade, and as soon as they are out, they suffer no psychological consequences, like PTSD.

Of course, each person is unique, and each person will react differently to different things, but doing the due diligence research into psychology will help you to create your characters in a more realistic manner.

5. Use the library and the internet

A library should be your first step when beginning research for your novel, simply because you will be able to gain access to a lot of written material as well as public records (depending on the library). Additionally, a librarian would be able to help you on the topic at hand and probably recommend some sources (books, newspapers) that would save you time when doing the research.

The internet is also an incredible tool because there is a lot of information available. If some materials are not available at your local library, you could potentially be able to find them online. A lot of libraries these days also have a digital version (where digital versions of the books are available from their online systems), so if some materials are not available physically at your local library, you might be able to get them from an online one.

On the internet, you will be able to find material of any type – from written material (eBooks, newspaper reports, interviews), to documentaries, amateur YouTube videos on a certain topic, to news reports, ads, and other content in video format, both from times before and after the internet was available worldwide.

6. Talk to people and visit online forums

Talking to people is a very important part of the research process. Writers in general tend to have a vast variety of knowledge on a lot of topics, but that knowledge never crosses over into professional knowledge. As the saying goes, “Jack of all trades, master of nothing”, and that is very true for writers.

So, you want to have your protagonist be a doctor? Talk to a doctor who works at a hospital. Ask them about their days, their working hours, the crises they face at work. One of your characters is a lawyer? Try to talk to a lawyer. Talk to a psychologist or a therapist if you wish to have a character dealing with trauma. Talk to a detective or a police chief if you’re writing a police procedural. If you’re writing about a person who goes missing, talk to a professional to understand what the usual police process would be like.

The list goes and on and on. Of course, you might not be able to talk to these people in real life. That is where online forums come in.

Online forums are a specific corner on the internet, on websites like Reddit and others, where people go and comment on a variety of topics. Visiting online forums can help you find information on human experiences – with trauma, with addiction, with psychological disorders like ADHD, OCD, anxiety, and more.

You can also find posts and comments from people describing their jobs, professions, and daily lives too. You will be able to find information on what it’s like to be a waitress, a doctor, an astrophysicist, an astronaut, and anything and everything in between. You can also try to get in touch over the internet with some of the people who have posted or commented, and see if they would be interested to talk with you directly.

However, please note that when it comes to forums, you should treat information gleaned from online posts and comments with a grain of salt. Anyone can go on the internet and comment on forums, pretending to be a doctor or a veterinarian. So, use the information carefully and with some trepidation.

7. Visit or virtually view real life places

Your novel might be set in the town or city where you’ve lived for most of your life, currently live in, or have visited before. But, it might also be set in a city where you have never been. Unless you ensure to research the place properly, chances are you will not describe the place as it is.

Additionally, you might need to set a part of your novel in a museum or a real life place, like the Vatican for example, the Louvre Museum, the Palace of Versailles, or the Grand Canyon.

It is always advisable to visit the place if you can. This can be a luxury and you might not be able to afford the travel expenses. You might not even gain access to some parts of a certain museum even if you pay for the most expensive ticket.

Again, the internet comes to the rescue here. Google Maps has street view – an option to view the area from a ground point of view. Of course, this is not strictly available for every place of the world, but it is available for a lot of places, from big cities, to remote islands and deserts – you can even take a virtual trek of the Grand Canyon.

Additionally, a lot of places also might offer virtual tours (in video format) of the premises, which can help you get a good idea of the layout of a museum, the sections, the displayed pieces, and more.

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• Tags: Fiction Research , Fiction Writing

The most basic understanding of “fiction” in literature is that it is a written piece that depicts imaginary occurrences. There is this unspoken assumption that fiction, because it is of imagined events, has nothing to do with reality (and therefore researching for a novel is not important). This is far from the truth. 

The history of fiction writing presents an inherent paradox: the most gripping of novels require you to write of imagined events in a realistic way. If we accept literature as a reflection of the world around us, then we must also acknowledge that the best of fiction stems from reality. It may be an account of imaginary events, but is still heavily rooted in the real. 

Elevate your novel after research and writing. Learn more

For a writer, this means in-depth research about various aspects of novel writing , including cultural and social context, character behavior, and historical details. 

Your task is (ever so slightly) easier if you are writing about situations contemporary to you. But the further you go back, through the annals of history, the harder it becomes to strive for such authenticity.

Grammar mistakes are jarring, but so are plot holes. An inconsistent story is off-putting to even the most immersed reader. So, here’s the bottom line: do n’t assume, and get your research down.

Why is research important for fiction?

Because even William Shakespeare, one of the most iconic figures of literature, erred in making anachronisms. One of the most famous literary anachronisms is in his play Julius Caesar , in Cassius’ line:

“The clock has stricken three.” (Act II, Scene 1)

The error is that clocks that “struck” were invented almost 14 centuries after the play was set! 

But Shakespeare was a giant. We have forgiven these misgivings because Shakespearean literature is rich even with such minuscule errors. As for us foolish mortals, it’s probably best to do our research thoroughly. 

Having a detailed understanding of the landscape that you are writing about is one of the most effective ways to draw your reader into the story world. Your extensive knowledge of your chosen topic will also give you a stable and authoritative voice in your writing.

What should you be researching?

As you might have realized by now, there are various aspects of your novel you should be researching. To start with, we’ve split fiction writing research into two categories: content and form. By content, we mean the details and elements you should focus on within your story. By form, we mean the style and genre of writing you wish to eventually adopt.

Needless to say, these two categories will overlap with each other as you make your story more streamlined.  

A story’s setting is one of the most important elements of fiction writing. It is essentially the time and space that your narrative is set in or the story’s backdrop. A story might have a gripping narrative and well-rounded characters, but it is incomplete if the reader doesn’t have a sense of where it’s all happening. As part of your setting, you can include geographical, cultural, social, and political details that you feel are relevant to the story.

In other words, you are essentially creating a “world” for your story . These may seem like tiny details to add to your otherwise imaginary story, but they provide depth and plausibility to your story.

One cool way to get a lowdown on these intricate spatial details like roads, mountains, hills, monuments, and other geographical landmarks is through tools like Google Maps and Street View . This is especially useful if you have to write about a place you can’t visit or you simply want to get geographical descriptions right.

The worst thing you could do as a writer is to assume things. This is a misstep that is quite unnecessary and can easily be avoided with some research. The information you have already gathered while researching your setting is a good enough start. What you now need to do with all these seemingly scattered pieces of information is to make sure they do not contradict each other.

Character details and human behavior

In plotting your story, you will also automatically gain an understanding of the intention and goals of your characters. In order to flesh them out and ensure that they are dynamic and interesting, research is required.

An understanding of human behavior and nature is a very important skill for a good writer. The stereotype of a perceptive and observant writer is, in fact, due to quite a practical need! Even if your characters do not exist in reality, they should seem real enough for your readers to be able to relate to them.

Historical and social background 

Your story world is not just the time, place, and immediate surroundings of your characters. Irrespective of what setting your story has, it also has the larger context of the world that your characters reside in. This could be from a real point in history (like Victorian England, 1920s jazz era, etc.) or it could be completely made up (Oceania from 1984, or Panem).

But irrespective of whether you’re writing historical fiction or creating a new world altogether, it must be thorough and consistent in supporting your plot. As a writer, you must clearly understand the culture and systems that your characters are a part of. A well-rooted universe also gives readers an insight into a character’s identity.

Writing style and genre 

If you are writing a novel in a particular genre, it’s important to be aware of writing conventions and tropes commonly used in that genre. The best, and most obvious, way to do this is to read novels and stories in your genre of choice. Look at the top-rated and critically acclaimed books and study them carefully. Be critical in your study, try to understand the author’s creative writing process, and look at the style and tone they try to evoke. 

Aside from this, you could also take a look at books about novel writing in general. These will give you general, but useful information about novel writing, like when to write long descriptions and when to cut straight to the action.

How should you be researching?

• Read about what you are researching. Books, articles, and other forms of print media are great ways to gather information on culture, history, and society. Biographies and memoirs are great for character insight (especially if you’re basing your book on a real person). If you’re basing your novel in the real world, you know what to do next. If you’re creating your own world, this is still a good basis for whatever you cook up within your world.
• Films and TV are great sources for helping you develop your character as they help you understand character traits and motivation in your story. Additionally, they might also help you visualize your story.
• If you are writing about characters with a niche profession (for example), take interviews with people who are in that field. For instance, if you are writing a detective story, talk to people in your police precinct and observe their behavior.
• If you are writing about specific locations, read up about that. In the age of the internet, there are many resources and forums where you can interact with people around the world.
• Try to visit the locations you are writing about and spend some time there , to gain an insight into what life in that place is like.

Incorporating research into fiction

Be selective about your details. Whether or not you actually incorporate the details that you have researched, knowing your world well will make your writing infinitely better. 

Because of all the information you have amassed, there is a certain bias you acquire as an “expert” on the subject of your story. So if you include a lot of information, there is a danger of your work sounding too technical.

Make sure that every detail you include is directly relevant to the plot. Keep it simple: and avoid unnecessary plot holes.

You can use these practical tips to research for your next story. Once you research and complete your story, the next step is to edit and publish your work.  As a trusted brand offering editing and proofreading services , we’d love to help you refine your work. 

Here are some other articles you might find interesting: 

• 5 Elements of a Short Story & 6 Stages of a Plot
• What is Flash Fiction? Definition, Examples & Types

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How to Research a Novel: 7 Tips

• Author: Tom Young

Ernest Hemingway said writers should develop a built-in bullshit detector. I imagine one reason he said that is because readers have their own BS indicators. They can tell when we writers are winging it. We have to know well the worlds in which our characters act. Readers don't have to believe the story really happened, but they need to believe it could have happened. So with that in mind, I offer a few thoughts on research for fiction.

1) You can't do too much research.  In the military, we often say time spent gathering intelligence is seldom wasted. The same concept applies in writing a novel. You never know what little detail will give a scene the ring of authenticity. In a college creative writing class, I wrote about how a scuba diver got cut underwater, and in the filtered light at depth, the blood appeared green. Though the professor didn't think much of that particular story, he did concede he liked that detail. In fact, he said, "The author must have seen that." And indeed, I had.

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2) You can write what you know. We've all heard it before. Experience may be a cruel teacher, but it is a thorough one, and experience is the purest form of research. Things you've done in life (like scuba diving) can inform your writing in surprising ways, even if your characters aren't doing those same things. When I watch the old Star Trek shows, I can tell the creator of those stories knew something about how a military flight crew works together. He understood the dynamics of a chain of command, how a commander learns the strengths and weaknesses of his team, how those team members communicate and work together. Turns out that Gene Roddenberry flew B-17 bombers in World War II. Roddenberry, of course, never flew a starship. But he knew from experience how the crew of a starship might interact.

3) You can do research on the cheap. If you can't visit an exotic location, you can pick up the phone and ask questions. The worst that can happen is somebody thinks you're crazy and they hang up. Then you just call somebody else. (Believe me; I used to be a reporter, and I've learned a lot by asking questions.) You can visit a museum, or a museum's website. Develop an eye for small details.

(Tom's written for the blog before. See his previous column, "The Advice I Needed as a New Writer But Never Got." )

4) You can find anything on YouTube. Seriously. But you have to know your topic well enough to know how to search for it. In The Renegades , I have a character whose lungs collapse from a bullet wound. I wanted to find out how a medic would treat that condition. Sure enough, someone had posted on YouTube a video with detailed instructions on how to perform a needle decompression.

5) You can find things anywhere. You're a writer, so keep pen and paper within reach during all waking hours. You might get an idea from a news story on television, a song on the radio, or a Tweet from a friend. About a year ago, I was driving along on a warm day, listening to the radio with the windows down. An oldies station played "Wind of Change," the Scorpions' 1990 ballad hailing the end of the Cold War. I hadn't heard that song in a long time, and I cranked it up loud. The power chords brought back memories of flying relief missions to Bosnia while based at a disused Cold War alert facility in Germany. Not really a pleasant memory--for Bosnia, the end of the Cold War brought something worse. But that flashback from early in my military career inspired a scene in the novel I'm working on now.

6) You can use all your senses. Find out what things taste like, smell like, feel like. Say, for example, you set your novel in Warsaw. Maybe you can't afford to go to Warsaw, but you can go to a Polish restaurant. (See item number three above, about doing research on the cheap.) As you write one of your scenes, include a line about the texture and flavor of something your character eats. You've just made your writing more alive and authentic.

7) You can leave some things out. If you do thorough research, you'll find more material than you need, and no reader likes a data dump. In my own writing, I could bore you to death with the details of aircraft and weapons. But a very good creative writing professor once advised me to let the reader "overhear" the tech talk. Say, if my character punches off a HARM missile, that might sound authentic and pretty scary. But scary would turn to dull if I stopped the action to tell you that HARM stands for High-Speed Anti-Radiation Missile, which homes in on anti-aircraft missile radars. Who cares? The damn thing goes boom.

Since I began this discussion with a quote from a literary heavyweight of the twentieth century, I'll end it with another: Ezra Pound said literature is news that stays news. And a novelist has nearly the same obligation for accuracy as a news writer. Your made-up world must ring true. Not even fantasy writers can completely escape reality; the old Star Trek episodes sometimes referred to real science, which made them more believable within their context. Though we invent tales that didn't really happen, we drape them over a framework of real-life facts.

With a growing catalog of instructional writing videos available instantly, we have writing instruction on everything from improving your craft to getting published and finding an audience. New videos are added every month!

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An Effective Guide On How To Research For A Novel

Read 100 books before you write one (100 is an exaggeration, but at least 10).

• Don’t choose a close family member or spouse as your writing partner–for the obvious reason that they may tend to be biased.
• Don’t choose a person who is writing a book in the same genre or theme as yours – there are high chances that both of you may indulge in unintentional plagiarism .
• Choose someone you can trust and whose honest feedback you wouldn’t mind taking.
• Choose someone who would be passionate and interested in reading a writing that belongs to that particular genre.
• At which point in time will your story be based on – the past, recent past, present, present continuous, immediate future, or future?
• How many days, months, years, or decades will your story run through? Is it a story that will start and end within a year or run across generations?
• Will your story be based on a huge event or calamity – like an earthquake, war, independence, etc.?
• Your research materials and results must be readily available while you are writing your book.
• You must keep track of the parts where you need to p research.
• Start Researching Well In Advance – at least a month or fortnight before starting the actual writing.
• Join a Book or Writers’ Club – this will help you get motivated to write more.
• Set a Time Limit for Your Research – researches can be an on-goingprocess. Therefore, make sure that you know when to put an end to researching.
• Retain Your Research Materials Even After The Novel Is Published – who knows,it could prove useful during reprints or down the lane if you write a prequel or sequel.
• Use tools whenever and wherever necessary.
• It may lead to side-track writing, which is not healthy.
• It maybecome a never-ending process, where you get obsessed with researching and end up constantly changing your conceptsand characters.

Aishwarya Mukundarajan

Aishwarya is an MBA graduate from Symbiosis International University, Pune. When asked what her hobbies are she points to an overflowing bookcase.

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The Creative Penn

Writing, self-publishing, book marketing, making a living with your writing

How To Research Your Novel … And When To Stop

posted on January 18, 2017

I love book research. It's one of the most fun parts of the book creation process for me , but I definitely need to make sure I don't disappear down the rabbit-hole of research and forget to actually write!

If you’d like more help, check out my book: How to Write a Novel.

Is research really necessary?

If you're writing non-fiction, research will most likely be the basis of your book. For fiction, it can provide ideas on which to build your characters and plot.

You can go into the research phase with no concrete agenda , as I often do, and emerge with a clear idea of how your story will unfold. Or, if you have pre-existing ideas, research allows you to develop them further . In terms of reader expectation , research is critical in genres like historical fiction, as it will help you to create an accurate world and ground the story in reality.

When people read a story, they want to sink into your fictional world. If you introduce something that jolts the reader, the ‘fictive dream' is interrupted. For many genres, research can help you avoid this.

Most of my J.F.Penn thrillers are set in the present day and I like to have 95% reality in terms of places, historical accuracy and actual events. Then I push the edges of that reality a little further and see what happens.

How to research your novel

Research can take many forms. Here are some of my methods for gathering information.

(1) Research through reading and watching

“Books are made out of books” – Cormac McCarthy

Your research process can happen online at the various book retailers or Goodreads, but I also like to take it into the physical world by heading to libraries and bookstores, as you never quite know what you might discover. I think of it as serendipity in the stacks!

If you're writing fiction, it’s important to read extensively in your genre in order to understand the reader expectations, but many authors also find it helpful to read a wide range of non-fiction books on the topics they're interested in.

You can also read magazines and journals; browse images on Pinterest and Flickr; and watch documentaries and films on TV and YouTube. Fill the creative well!

If you have concerns about plagiarism, take note of this quote from Austin Kleon’s book Steal Like an Artist .

“Stealing from one person is plagiarism. Stealing from 100 is research.”

For example, if you read five books on the history of The Tudors and you've written notes on all of them, then you turn that into something new, that’s considered research and is an entirely natural part of the writing process. It only slips into plagiarism if you copy lines from another work and pass them off as your own , and of course, that’s something we would never want to do.

(2) Research through travel

One of my favorite ways to carry out research is to travel to places where I intend to set a novel .

This may not fit your budget, but it’s not always as expensive as you might expect, particularly if you travel during off-season periods. For my recent thriller End of Days , we did a research trip to Israel. You can join me for a walk around the Old City of Jerusalem in this video made on site .

Information on different locations can be found on our own doorstep and museum exhibitions are the perfect example of this. Follow your curiosity – maybe one museum exhibit leads you to another and each sparks your imagination somehow.

We're also very lucky in that we live in a time where it’s possible to research travel destinations online, so you can write about a place even if you haven't been there . You can find clips on YouTube, watch travel documentaries, read travel blogs, and even get a feel for walking around a location via Google maps.

(3) Research on Pinterest (or other visual social media)

We can find inspiration on Pinterest by browsing other people’s boards, but it’s also the perfect place to gather our own research and easily record it. I have Pinterest Boards for most of my J.F.Penn thriller novels now .

For fiction authors, the visual medium can be particularly valuable for sparking ideas and bringing our fictional worlds into reality. You can even share this inspiration with your readers.

(4) Let synchronicity emerge

When I started End of Days , I only had the title and I knew it would have to have some kind of apocalyptic event, but it also needed to be original.

I found two books:  The End ,  an overview of Bible prophecy and the end of days, and also The End: What Science and Religion Tell Us About the Apocalypse ,  a mix of scientific information and how different religions see the end of the world.

From these two books, I gathered a wealth of ideas including the quote for the beginning of the book from  Revelation 20:1-6

“Then I saw an angel coming down from heaven holding in his hand the key to the bottomless pit and a great chain. And he sees the dragon, that ancient serpent who is the devil and Satan and bound him for a thousand years and threw him into the pit, and shut it and sealed it over him until the thousand years were ended .”

The serpent element  sparked my curiosity so I started Googling art associated with serpents. I discovered Lilith, called the first wife of Adam and a demon closely associated with serpents.

Then I found this quote from the Talmud (Jewish scripture) about Lilith:

“The female of Samael is called ‘serpent, woman of harlotry, end of all flesh, end of days.'”

Yes, it actually calls her End of Days. Talk about synchronicity!

[This type of thing seems to happen with every novel I write, which makes me agree with a lot of what Elizabeth Gilbert says in Big Magic about ideas. It's a great book!] 

Lilith and Samael emerged as my antagonists from this research, which also gave me rich story ideas for the plot. All this came from my willingness to go down the research rabbit hole.

(5) Research possible settings

The next stage was to consider a setting for my story and how I could use snakes in a much bigger way.

The setting is always a very important element of my books , so I looked initially at places sacred to serpent worship. I found an amazing documentary on YouTube about the Appalachian Christians, who use serpents in their worship, and from there the backstory of Lilith grew. I theorized that if she came from a group who were not afraid of serpents, then this might explain how she gets involved in the end of days conspiracy.

From one initial Google search on serpent worship, I had an outline for the plot of my novel .

This should give you an idea of how powerful research can be, taking you from an initial spark of creativity through to a completed book.

How to organize and manage your research

Your research will be far more effective if you keep track of it as you progress. You can put a couple of lines into your phone or write a few notes in a journal as you go along, but at some point, you need to organize this information so you can get writing.

There is no right or wrong approach to managing your research, just choose the option that works best for you and it will likely evolve as your writing career progresses. Some people use physical files, like a filing system, or a pin board .

When to stop researching

Research can be a lot of fun, but at some point you have to stop researching and start writing. Remember,  research can become a form of procrastination  and the more you research, the more information you will find to include.

Therefore, as soon as you have enough information to write a scene about a place, event or person in your novel, then maybe you should stop and do some writing about it. Keep a balance between consumption and creation , input and output.

Another way to approach this is to set a time limit . For example, if you know you need to start writing on a particular date to hit a (self-imposed) deadline, then work backwards to allow yourself a research period before this.

You can always do additional research as you write, but the important thing is that the book is underway.

Get started with what you have, fill in the blanks later.

Should you use an Author's Note about your research?

At the end of all of my books, I add an Author's Note which includes information on where my research came from and links to my videos and images along the way. It’s certainly not a requirement to do this but it can be beneficial to both you and the reader . My readers often comment on it when they email about the books.

We're all unique and that’s what sets our books apart so don’t be afraid to approach research in the way that suits you best. Whether you use research to spark initial ideas or to drive your narrative forward, the time invested in it will ultimately reap rewards in terms of the quality of your finished book.

Do you love the research process? Do you have any questions or tips to offer? Please leave a comment below and join the conversation. 

If you’d like more help on researching, plotting or writing your book, check out my book: How to Write a Novel.

Reader Interactions

September 15, 2022 at 10:39 am

I’m writing a novel about immigrants to NY in the first decade of the previous century. I’ve done quite a bit of general research, but I’m stuck with specific details that are necessary to determine for the story, but which I can’t find answers to. Where does one go/Who does one turn to for the missing details? I’m pretty frustrated.

[…] to procrastinate from actually getting words onto paper or fingers onto keyboard. Joanna Penn of The Creative Penn has a great little […]

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How to do Research for a Novel

March 30, 2022 10 min read Fiction Historical Fiction

There is an abundance of information in books and online about how to research for a novel. Many writing books only discuss the topic peripherally, in sections focusing on character, theme, setting, or viewpoint. There are mentions of research in chapters examining the craft of writing, or planning.

Research, it is claimed, is a poor substitute for what you have experienced yourself. Online sources indicate how to keep notes, 5 steps to research, 7 steps or 7 tips, 21 steps, 9 key strategies, or other such itemized approaches.

But this article is about the process of research through direct and indirect experience , a case study with a focus on indirect experience.

So, what is direct and indirect experience, anyway?

Direct experience is life experience. You have gone places and done things in your life, and this is researching your topic through direct experience. If you have direct experience, how do you begin transcribing those experiences and making them interesting, coherent, and structured enough for a novel ?

Indirect experience can be studying life during a specific time in history where direct experience is not possible. So, in that case, what do you do? Where do you start? 

Direct Experience

To take your memories and create the basis for a novel, you can begin by looking at your own unique past.

Novels created from direct experience can be very unique. 

I lived and worked in Ecuador, South America for a year. This formed the basis of my first two novels, Poor Man’s Galapagos , and Abundance of the Infinite . 

In Poor Man’s Galapagos , Tómas Harvey is an irrigation engineering student living on a small, impoverished island in Ecuador. His father is a renowned British travel writer who has travelled to many of the places I have visited. Many of the characters are conglomerations of people I knew there.

I was once locked in the university where I worked, along with students who were protesting against the president of the country. Tear gas bombs were being tossed inside by an armoured military vehicle. Burning tires lined the streets to prevent entry into the small town of Portoviejo. This forms the opening for my novel. 

Abundance of the Infinite is about a psychologist who travels from Toronto to a small coastal fishing town in Ecuador. It is a story about the blurred line between lucid dreams and reality in a place so utterly foreign as the tropical rainforest through which I, and the main character, travelled. 

Even with direct experience, some research is still required. This leads in to the next section…

Indirect Experience

In my latest novel, Intervals of Hope, the main character Nicholas lives with his mother and brother in London, England between the world wars. His father served with the First Battalion, First Canadian Regiment in the trenches of the Great War, and worked in the coal mines of South Leeds. This may seem, at first glance, like daunting research. 

In beginning this research, I had the looming question later posed to me in the book launch . How many other books are out there set in the same time and place, and what makes mine different? So these are questions you should keep in mind.

As I answered in my book launch, there were some crime novels that took place in England between the wars, and some mass-market type books with scenes in that time period such as Ken Follett's Fall of Giants and Winter of the World .  These were published within the last decade or so. A London Family Between the Wars , published in 1940, was written as a memoir but had a lot of interesting details.

So, I didn’t find a lot of interesting literary fiction set between the wars that explored the fascist movement in Britain at the time, the conditions leading England to war, the stories of the coal miners (although George Orwell’s Road to Wigan Pier was appealing), as well as the reality of those who chose to escape their countries in a time of war, and the homing call for them to return and fight.

A key to the uniqueness of Intervals of Hope is the examination of the father-son relationship during that tumultuous time, given that the main character’s father was a WWI veteran, and the novel’s examination of the effect his father’s legacy had on his son as WWII loomed and ultimately took shape.

Copious Reading

As the novel starts in London, England between the wars, that's where I started my research. I read books such as the history of London (which was long and quite dry, highly recommended for insomniacs) and In the News , a book of newspaper clippings from 1930-1939. And George Orwell's The Road to Wigan Pier about life in the coal mines of South Leeds.

A 1930s scrapbook showed common household items and magazines of the time. And Inside Europe by John Gunther, the October 1938 edition. That is a rare book, published just before WWII broke out, so it showed what the state of Europe was at that time without any skewed historical lens. 

So, where does your novel start? Perhaps your non-fiction research can start there.

Look for unconventional books, rare books that can help you put a unique spin on the world you are attempting to create.

But what of fictional influences? I read other books of fiction before and during the writing of the novel, and these are listed below. 

What fiction has influenced you to write the novel you are working on? Re-reading them might provide some fresh insights and inspiration, and infuse your book with renewed vitality.

Timothy Findley's The Wars . This was an interesting literary novel exploring the effects that WWI had on an empathetic main character. I once met with a publisher who said that Intervals of Hope shouldn't be published because The Wars was done so well. I disagree with his assessment, as under that presumption all writers should put their pens down based on the excellence of what's been done before.

Joseph Boyden's Three Day Road. Joseph drew upon family stories from his grandfather and uncle, who served as soldiers during WWI. For Intervals of Hope , I was provided with e ighty-five letters, which were sent home during WWI by my great-grandfather. These letters were discovered in a family attic, and form part of the novel.

Ken Follett's Fall of Giants and Winter of the World. This is a mass-market, sprawling epic focused on an assortment of characters in WWI and WWII. With the epic scope, the inner life of the characters was not explored in great detail, which is what I was after in my novel. However, these books provided interesting aspects of these times. 

Want to write better short stories? Sign up for a 1-on-1 consultation with our short story expert, Author  Tevis Shkodra .

Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls . Robert Jordan was an explosives expert with a mission to destroy a bridge in the Spanish Civil War. Pablo, the anti-fascist guerilla leader, and his wife Pilar are excellent secondary characters. A real inspiration.

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller. A very funny book set in Italy during World War II, this is the story of a bombardier, Yossarian, a hero who is furious because thousands of people he has never met are trying to kill him.

Roddy Doyle's A Star Called Henry about Henry Smart in the Irish Rebellion, which was quite comical at times. Well written, lively, not one I would have sought out but a reading suggestion from the publisher as I was engaging in rewrites. This is a real study in unique and bold characterization.  

Stephen Crane's Red Badge of Courage was published thirty years after the American Civil War had ended, by a man who was born after the war. It was acclaimed for its realism by veterans of the war. So maybe you are attempting something similar with your novel, and it may be worth a read. 

All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque, about WWI from the German perspective. The idealism of youth turns sour from what they see and experience. Another story similar to The Wars , exploring the effect of war on the individual.

There was also a book on Canadians who deserted the battlefields during WWI, which I found interesting and which forms part of the conflict that two of the characters face in the novel.  

So, that was my reading list. What is yours? Think about allocating space on your bookshelf for a reading list pertaining to your current novel. Refer to your books from time to time. Seek inspiration from them when needed. Immerse yourself in the world you are attempting to create. 

Reading for research and inspiration is essential, to which any author can attest. Read what has been done before. Learn why it is considered great.

But what else gives authenticity and life to your novel? 

Interviewing

In the course of writing Intervals of Hope , I wanted to get some details right. So, I contacted a man named George Sharp who lived in London, England between the wars. I was able to read his story online, and ask him questions about his life at that time.

Unlike the novel’s main character, George was a police officer. But he provided a lot of good input, clarifications, and details, and he seemed interested in sharing his memories and experience.

A key element of the novel is the father-son relationship. But originally, the father was not fully formed. He was a stale character , lacking any substance that would make for conflict between him and his son.

But then, I read about a man named Gordon Schottlander in a local newspaper. Gordon was a veteran of WWII who lived in London, England between the wars, and his father was a soldier in WWI. This paralleled the novel’s main character. So, I reached out to Gordon and he graciously agreed to be interviewed for the book. We had many wonderful conversations that I will always remember.

He attended the book launch. He read the book, and enjoyed it. There will be an interview with him and the publisher online, which is scheduled for early next month. Gordon was highly-trained as a British Commando, a special operations force formed by Churchill to engage in secretive and dangerous missions.

He was a commissioned officer who stormed the beaches on D-Day. He is an amazing and humble man and it's been a blessing to know him. And a lot of his story comes through in the book.    

Gordon sharing his experiences with me enriched the novel in countless ways: his wartime experiences , living in London in the 1930s, and Gordon's relationship with his father. This is part of what provides the book with authenticity and makes it unique. 

Look for opportunities that you may have to interview those who have lived the life of your characters, or can provide you with unique perspectives that will enrich your novel and bring it to life.

Letters and Correspondence

When searching for historical documents, look to libraries and public archives. Seek them out within your own family.

Look to others you know, or individuals you can contact about your subject. Pursue opportunities to obtain unknown historical documents. 

While writing Intervals of Hope , I learned that e ighty-five letters sent home during WWI by my great-grandfather, Wilfrid Littlejohn, had been discovered in a family attic. Wilfrid was in E Company, 1st Battalion, 1st Brigade and was one of the first Canadians to be sent overseas and among the last to return. He was one of 70 out of 1000 men in his regiment to have survived.

The letters were sent home to Wilfrid's parents, his brother, and his aunt from the trenches, hospitals and camps. Some sections of the letters were scribbled over by censors who would review the letters prior to sending them.

Letters were censored during WWI to prevent the enemy from obtaining secret information about upcoming battles , numbers of troops in specific locations, etc. so I had to surmise what might be in those sections.

When I received the letters, they were digitized and arranged chronologically. So, I read through and then transcribed them. When looking at what to include in the novel, I went through what effect certain letters would be on the main character at specific points in his life, knowing what was happening in his country in the 1930s in England, and what was occurring in Germany, Italy, Spain, and Japan.

Seek out opportunities to find such documents to be utilized within your novel, or as reference or research material. Such documents can prove to be invaluable.

Travel can not only add realism to your novel through details, but it can also inspire you to get to the business of writing! 

I travelled to London England many times and went around the city as the main character would have, visiting most of the places he frequented in the book. I took notes as I walked around, carefully documenting my surroundings and how these may have been perceived by the characters in the novel.

This helped inspire the story by allowing me to experience part of the life of the main character, and others. 

Final Thoughts

Good research lends credibility to your work, and gives the reader the feeling of direct experience. Imagine your readers feeling that they have lived the life of your characters as they read your book, and have therefore had a direct experience. What about that for a goal?

As a last word, given direct or indirect experience, you will still need to: 

• Read copiously. You should be interested enough in the research to read many books about your subject. Even boring books (for example, a book about the history of London, England) can also feed into your writing.  
• Interview , if possible, to derive from first hand experiences of people who were there.
• Communicate with others who know about your subject.
• Research on your own . When researching online, know that some sources such as Wikipedia can be changed and are therefore potentially unreliable. I have found information on Wikipedia that could not be corroborated elsewhere.  
• Travel to the places in your novel, if possible.
• Look at resources that are rarely used . In researching for an upcoming novel, I obtained a researcher card at the Toronto Library Archives and used a microfiche to get countless documents about my subject. I was able to learn about the basis for the main character of my novel.
• Don't get bogged down in research while you're writing . Focus on telling the story. Write out your scenes. See where more research is needed, and then add details utilizing research.

Now, get that novel going!

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On the Fine Art of Researching For Fiction  

Jake wolff: how to write beyond the borders of your experience.

The first time I considered the relationship between fiction and research was during a writing workshop—my first—while I watched the professor eviscerate some poor kid’s story about World War II. And yeah, the story was bad. I remember the protagonist being told to “take cover” and then performing several combat rolls to do so.

“You’re college students,” the professor said. “Write about college students.”

Later, better professors would clarify for me that research, with a touch of imagination, can be a perfectly valid substitute for experience. But that’s always where the conversation stopped. If we ever uttered the word “research” in a workshop, we did so in a weaponized way to critique a piece of writing: “This desperately needs more research,” we’d all agree, and then nothing more would be said. We’d all just pretend that everyone in the room already knew how to integrate research into fiction and that the failures of the story were merely a lack of effort rather than skill. Secretly, though, I felt lost.

I knew research was important, and I knew how to research. My questions all had to do with craft. How do I incorporate research into fiction? How do I provide authenticity and detail without turning the story into a lecture? How much research is too much? Too little?

How do I allow research to support the story without feeling obligated to remain in the realm of fact—when I am, after all, trying to write fiction?

I heavily researched my debut novel, in which nearly every chapter is science-oriented, historical, or both. I’d like to share a method I used throughout the research and writing process to help deal with some of my questions. This method is not intended to become a constant fixture in your writing practice. But if you’re looking for ways to balance or check the balance of the amount of research in a given chapter, story, or scene, you might consider these steps: identify, lie, apply.

I recently had a conversation with a former student, now a friend, about a short story he was writing. He told me he was worried he’d packed it too full of historical research.

“Well,” I said, “how much research is in there?”

“Uhhh,” he answered. “I’m not sure?”

That’s what we might call a visualization problem. It’s hard to judge the quantity of something you can’t see.

I’ve faced similar problems in my own work. I once received a note from my editor saying that a certain chapter of my novel read too much like a chemistry textbook. At first, I was baffled—I didn’t think of the chapter as being overly research-forward. But upon reading it again, I realized I had missed the problem. After learning so much about chemistry, I could no longer “see” the amount of research I had crammed into twenty pages.

Literature scholars don’t have this problem because they cite their sources; endnotes, footnotes, and the like don’t merely provide a tool for readers to verify claims, but also provide a visual reminder that research exists within the text. Thankfully, creative writers generally don’t have to worry about proper MLA formatting (though you should absolutely keep track of your sources). Still, finding a quick way to visually mark the research in your fiction is the least exciting but also the most important step in recognizing its role in your work.

Personally, I map my research in blue. So when my editor flagged that chapter for me, I went back to the text and began marking the research. By the end of the process, the chapter was filled with paragraphs that looked like this one:

Progesterone is a steroid hormone that plays an especially important role in pregnancy. Only a few months before Sammy arrived in Littlefield, a group of scientists found the first example of progesterone in plants. They’d used equipment I would never be able to access, nuclear magnetic resonance and mass spectroscopy, to search for the hormone in the leaves of the English Walnut trees. In humans, aging was associated with a drop in progesterone and an increase in tumor formation—perhaps a result of its neurosteroidal function.

My editor was spot-on: this barely qualified as fiction. But I truly hadn’t seen it. As both a writer and teacher, I’m constantly amazed by how blind we can become to our own manuscripts. Of course, this works the other way, too: if you’re writing a story set in medieval England but haven’t supported that setting with any research, you’ll see it during this step. It’s such an easy, obvious exercise, but I know so few writers who do this.

Before moving on, I’ll pause to recommend also highlighting research in other people’s work. If there’s a story or novel you admire that is fairly research-forward, go through a few sections and mark anything that you would have needed research to write. This will help you see the spacing and balance of research in the fiction you’re hoping to emulate.

(Two Truths and a) Lie

You’ve probably heard of the icebreaker Two Truths and a Lie: you tell two truths and one lie about yourself, and then the other players have to guess which is the lie. I’d rather die than play this game in real life, but it works beautifully when adapted as a solo research exercise.

It’s very simple. When I’m trying to (re)balance the research in my fiction, I list two facts I’ve learned from my research and then invent one “fact” that sounds true but isn’t. The idea is to acquaint yourself with the sound of the truth when it comes to a given subject and then to recreate that sound in a fictive sentence. It’s a way to provide balance and productivity, ensuring that you’re continuing to imagine and invent —to be a fiction writer— even as you’re researching.

I still have my notes from the first time I used this exercise. I was researching the ancient Chinese emperor Qin Shi Huang for a work of historical fiction I would later publish in One Story. I was drowning in research, and the story was nearing fifty pages (!) with no end in sight. My story focused on the final years of the emperor’s life, so I made a list of facts related to that period, including these:

1. The emperor was obsessed with finding the elixir of life and executed Confucian scholars who failed to support this obsession.

2. If the emperor coughed, everyone in his presence had to cough in order to mask him as the source.

3. The emperor believed evil spirits were trying to kill him and built secret tunnels to travel in safety from them.

Now, the second of those statements is a lie. My facts were showing me that the emperor was afraid of dying and made other people the victims of that fear—my lie, in turn, creates a usable narrative detail supporting these facts. I ended up using this lie as the opening of the story. I was a graduate student at the time, and when I workshopped the piece, my professor said something about how the opening worked because “It’s the kind of thing you just can’t make up.” I haven’t stopped using this exercise since.

We have some facts; we have some lies. The final step is to integrate these details into the story. We’ll do this by considering their relationship to the beating heart of fiction: conflict. You can use this step with both facts and lies. My problem tends to be an overload of research rather than the opposite, so I’ll show you an example of a lie I used to help provide balance.

In a late chapter in my book, three important characters—Sammy and his current lover Sadiq and his ex- lover Catherine—travel to Rapa Nui (Easter Island). They’ve come to investigate a drug with potential anti-aging properties that originates in the soil there (that’s a fact; the drug is called rapamycin). As I researched travel to Easter Island, my Two Truths and a Lie exercise produced the following lie:

There are only two airports flying into Easter Island; these airports constantly fight with each other.

In reality, while there are two airports serving Easter Island (one in Tahiti; the other in Chile), nearly everyone flies from Chile, and it’s the same airline either way. On its surface, this is the kind of lie I would expect to leave on the cutting room floor—it’s a dry, irrelevant detail.

But when I’m using the ILA method, I try not to pre-judge. Instead, I make a list of the central conflicts in the story or chapter and a list of the facts and lies. Then I look for applications—i.e., for ways in which each detail may feel relevant to the conflicts. To my surprise, I found that the airport lie fit the conflicts of the chapter perfectly:

Ultimately, the airport lie spoke to the characters, all of whom were feeling the painful effects of life’s capriciousness, the way the choices we make can seem under our control but also outside it, arbitrary but also fateful. I used this lie to introduce these opposing forces and to divide the characters: Sammy and Sadiq fly from Tahiti; Catherine flies from Chile.

Two airports in the world offered flights to Rapa Nui—one in Tahiti, to the west, and one in Chile, to the east. Most of the scientists stayed in one of those two countries. There was no real meaning to it. But still, it was hard, in a juvenile way, not to think of the two groups as opposing teams in a faction. There was the Tahiti side, and there was the Chile side, and only one could win.

This sort of schematic—complete with a table and headers—may seem overly rigid to you, to which I’d respond, Gee, you sound like one of my students. What can I say? I’m a rigid guy. But when you’re tackling a research-intensive story, a little rigidity isn’t the worst thing. Narrative structure does not supply itself. It results from the interplay between the conflicts, the characters, and the details used to evoke them. I’m presenting one way, of many, to visualize those relationships whenever you’re feeling lost.

Zora Neal Hurston wrote, “Research is formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose.” Maybe that’s why I’m thinking of structure and rigidity—research, for me, is bolstering in this way. It provides form. But it’s also heavy and hard to work with. It doesn’t bend. If you’re struggling with the burden of it, give ILA a shot and see if unsticks whatever is holding you back. If you do try this approach, let me know if it works for you—and if it doesn’t, feel free to lie.

__________________________________

Jake Wolff’s  The History of Living Forever is out now from FSG.

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21 Ways to Research your Novel

Before writing a novel, it’s important to do research on the location, the time period, the people, the food, and the hobbies and jobs of the characters. Many authors dread researching, but it can actually be fun! Here are a few ideas to help you research your novel.

Research your novel with experience

1. Write what you know—use personal experience to write your novel. 2. Visit restaurants that serve the same food your characters would eat in their location. 3. If you have the funds, travel to the location where your characters live. 4. Visit museum exhibits to discover more information about different locations and subjects. 5. Take classes on subjects your characters are interested or have talents in.

Read for research

6. Visit the library and find reference books on the subject. 7. Read novels that are in the same genre as the novel you’re writing (especially bestsellers). 8. Read magazines and journals on the subject.

Use the Internet

9. Look up videos on YouTube . Often a visual image will spark ideas you can include in your book. 10. Do a Google search and see what others have to say (be sure to check their sources, though, to make sure that what they’re saying is reliable). 11. Look up documentaries on the subject. 12. Look around on Pinterest for ideas, inspiration, and information.

Research by interacting with others

13. Call people who live in the location your novel takes place (even if it’s at random from the phone book!). 14. Interview people who have experience with the subjects you touch on in your novel. 15. Email or call experts in the field you need to learn more about, asking them just a few specific questions about the topic that you wouldn’t be able to easily find answers to elsewhere. 16. Watch others who are similar to your characters to see how they think, feel, and talk.

Miscellaneous ideas

17. Write down everything you discover and learn. You don’t need to use all the information you find—in fact, you absolutely won’t used it all—but it’s better to collect more than you’ll use than to have too little. Until you finish the actual writing, you never know what tidbit you might need to pull in. 18. Type up and organize your notes in a way that makes sense to you. 19. Don’t go so overboard when you research your novel that you start procrastinating the writing. If it’s helpful, set a time limit for your research. 20. After you begin your book, if you run into something minor you need to know (like the name or description of an object), you can always type XXXX as a placeholder and do the research for it later so you don’t bog down the writing at a moment when the writing is flowing. 21. Leave some of the things you researched out when you write. It’s extremely jarring to the reader when an author stops the flow of the story to explain how something works or what something means. If it isn’t pertinent to the story and doesn’t introduce confusion by its omission, leave it out! With your research, you can make sure your characters are using the correct terms and reacting appropriately, but you don’t have to include every detail of what you researched. A little authentic flavor goes a long way.

We hope this post has given you some researching ideas. Do you have any tips or tricks on how to research your novel? We’d love to hear in the comments!

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Reuse notice: non-commercial users, feel free to print out “21 ways to research your novel” for personal use or give to friends, share online, or make a meme of, as long as you attribute and link back to this post. commercial users, you may share a link to this post or quote a short excerpt from it with attribution and a link to this site, but you may not use this post in its entirety. thank you for caring about copyright..

I am a copyeditor and a typesetter of print books, and have been editing and typesetting (using InDesign) for fifteen years. As the executive editor at Book Cave, I enjoy helping authors be successful, and I only get interrupted a little bit (ha!) by my way-too-smart-for-his-own-good four-year-old and my cute one-year-old.

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Leave a Reply

This 21 research guide has been so helpful. I have got a writing tip for you and your readers. Have you tried using the silly tweets on Twitter and The silly articles on Facebook as writing prompts? If not it’s worth a try.

I have written 2 short stories, i would love to send them to you for your feedback

Thanks for the tips. I actually left the whole runaway/cops out of one story, maybe realized it needs the social issue part of life in a romance. But my mystery novel has twist of having no cops.

Catia, helpful article. I write a column for a local Writer’s Organization. On occasion, I will get permission and use a column such as yours instead of writing my own. I always cite the author. I’m wondering if you’d be letting me use this column for that purpose. If so, please give me the wording to use to cite you and your columns. Thanks.

Judythe, you’re welcome to use quotes from the article as long as you include a link back to this page, or write a summary of the post and link back to this page, but please don’t use the entirety of the post, as that would be flagged as duplicate content by Google. Thanks!

Thanks, Catia. Judythe

First and foremost, Thanks for putting your knowledge out there to help others. I am a first time novel writer, and research has always been fun to me even if it has nothing to do with my current book project, all of your tips are spot on a few I have not tried in past but am going to insert them in to my current researching habits. Thanks for being you and doing what you do

Sincerely William Graham

Yes seeing through it but as they are passing through it they grasp a concept and learn it WELL ONE would hope that they grasp it and have personal growth from it. Sincerely, Fernando Augusto Osorio

Book Cave I love it! Its like the allegory of the cave hence me wanting a mentor get it? I love it even more that I remembered that Glaucon was with his mentor Socrates hence me wanting a mentor also, your Book Cave could be a very good site for me. Greatest regards, Fernando Augusto Osorio

I want to write a book in the future and would like a mentor what would you suggest I do to go about getting a mentor? Thanks, Fernando Augusto Osorio

How to Research a Historical Novel: Escape the Research Rabbit Hole

by Guest Blogger | 0 comments

It doesn't take any research to know that historical fiction writers love spending time in history books, digital archives, museum exhibits, and library collections—and that's just in our spare time!

But how do we keep that research from overshadowing the actual writing of our books? How do you research a historical novel without getting lost in the research rabbit hole?

This guest post is by Susanne Dunlap, author of twelve works of historical fiction for adults and teens. You can find her newest book The Portraitist here and find all her books and courses on her website susanne-dunlap.com. 

Face it, none of us would write historical novels if we didn’t love the research. If we’re lucky enough to go to historical archives, the very smell of the dust, the idea that the materials and primary sources were handled by people decades or centuries ago, gives us a thrill.

And when we discover something others have overlooked, maybe that little fact that gives us something to hang an entire plot on—pour the champagne! History inspires us, it amazes us, it fascinates us—it torments us.

Research is wonderful and essential. But it can so easily commandeer all our time and energy.

How far do you need to go to track down a person or a date? What if you can’t go to places or get ahold of archival material? Do you have to know everything about the historical period and place and characters in your novel?

Won’t readers be waiting with red pens to circle any little thing you get wrong, or take exception to your interpretation of a historical character’s motives?

And what about the sheer volume of material we now have access to, thanks to the Internet and online archives? One thing leads to another and then another and then another. Before we know it, weeks have passed and we’ve got tons of research but haven’t put a word on a page.

How to Escape the Overwhelm of Research

I had to let go of that tendency to remain mired in research in a hurry when I was forced to research and write a complete manuscript in a year. It had been sold on a one-page proposal.

As I wrote, I remember being certain that someone would take me to task for changing the year a composition by Chopin was published, which I had to do in order to make my story work. But no one cared in the end.

That’s when I first learned that the story comes first, history comes second—a lesson I've had to learn over and over. Story first, history second.

That may sound like sacrilege coming from someone who started writing historical fiction after being in the academic world—a PhD in music history from Yale.

In academic articles, it really mattered that I’d consulted every known source, verified everything and didn’t categorically state something unless I knew it was backed up with historical sources and facts. I learned that the hard way, submitting articles for peer review. Ouch.

When I chose to start writing historical fiction, the research obsession was still deeply ingrained. For the sake of readers and my own sanity, though, I had to learn how to subjugate research to story.

I don’t mean being inaccurate or anachronistic (when a detail is in the wrong time period such as a television in 11th century Europe). I mean becoming comfortable with the necessary limits and with using my own imagination to fill in any gaps.

When My Research Turned Into a Rabbit Hole

My novel The Portraitist is a good example. I started working on it—on and off—seven years ago. Then, I was researching Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun, the bitter rival of Adélaïde Labille-Guiard (protagonist of The Portraitist ), thinking she would be the focus of my story.

There was so much material about her, so many paintings, a Metropolitan Museum exhibition of her work, and her own three-volume autobiography—published when she was very old.

Not only that, but because she was the official portraitist to Marie Antoinette, I felt obliged to research everything about the doomed queen and the true events surrounding Louis XVI’s court.

Through that research, I discovered a close friend of Elisabeth’s, another artist: Rosalie Bocquet Filleul. What a story there!

She married the concierge of the Château de la Muette and became concierge herself after his death. She produced several pastel portraits of royals, and—perhaps more interesting—took a number of likenesses of her neighbor in Passy, Benjamin Franklin.

When I discovered that little fact I had to start researching Benjamin Franklin, his life and politics and how he ended up in that diplomatic residence next door to Rosalie Filleul—of whom he became very fond, not least of all because she was stunningly beautiful.

The rest of Rosalie’s story was poignant and tragic. She ended up guillotined because she auctioned off some chairs that belonged to the Château (I argue she was destitute and nearly starving).

So I wrote a manuscript that encompassed the stories of all three of these remarkable women. How could I leave anything out?

Turns out, I should have. That manuscript was a monster. Too long, too complicated, and I couldn’t do justice to any of the women. I had Too. Much. Information.

How to Set Research Limits

Now, of course we love stumbling on all that good stuff, those intriguing tidbits and interconnections. I’m not saying you shouldn’t do that—there’s no “should” about this.

My point is that at some juncture, you have to let go of the idea of “everything,” or the idea that you have to be the expert, and set your limits.

What limits? You might ask. There are several ways you can rein in your research so it really serves your story.

Once you’ve done enough research to figure out the primary story you want to tell, map it out. I mean that both literally and figuratively. I’m not an outliner by nature, but I’ve learned—again, the hard way—that it’s important to know a few basic things:

1. The time period of your story present.

This may seem obvious. Of course you know what time period you’re writing in!

What I’m suggesting here is that you take a good, hard look at how much of that stretch of time you really want to use.

While there may be a case for covering the entire real life of a historical figure, that sort of endeavor is best left to a biographer. You’re looking for the period bounded by the exact moment that triggers the action in your story, and the exact moment when your protagonist’s arc of change is complete.

Put another way, the moment at which the story question is answered.

You’ll no doubt have researched things around this historical time period, and that’s good background information. But you only really need to look in depth at the historical events that directly affect your protagonist.

2. The places where the story is set.

This is possibly a little easier. I’ll give you a simple example: The Portraitist takes place before, during, and after the French Revolution. But it’s set entirely in or near Paris.

To get even more precise, the primary locations are the Louvre, Versailles, the Château de Bellevue, and a suburb of Paris called Pontault en Brie.

No doubt a lot was going on in other parts of France, and of course, there’s that whole American Revolution that had an impact on the French, but it didn’t impinge on my protagonist’s life. Not Adélaïde’s, in any case. (I axed Benjamin Franklin when I focused the story away from Rosalie.)

Once you have that all mapped out, you can get the vital everyday life information about how your characters get from place to place, how long it takes, whether it was comfortable or a huge pain, how much it might have cost, etc.

I did say you still have to do a lot of research, didn’t I?

3. The main characters.

Another obvious one, but if you keep reminding yourself that the focus is on your protagonist and one or two others, you might avoid amassing research that would only bog down your story if you tried to include it.

And maybe you’ll stop yourself from digging into the life of an interesting but peripheral character (did I mention Benjamin Franklin?) when you should be working on getting those words on the page.

4. Finally, give your research the necessity test.

This is simple: Ask yourself as you start diving into that rabbit hole if what you’re looking for is absolutely necessary.

If you don’t have that piece of information you’re looking for, will something important be missing from your book? Think it over. If the answer is no, then you're likely creating the dreaded info dump.

Once you’ve set your limits, organization is your best friend.

How to Organize Your Research

I have one word for you (and I’m not being paid to say this): Scrivener .

Even if you don’t want to use it as a drafting tool, it has so many great features, not the least of which is that you can use it to gather and organize all your research, even import Web pages so you don’t have to go hunting for that bookmark you forgot what you called or where you put it.

If you’re tech savvy, you can also add metadata to make it easy to search.

And if you’re REALLY tech savvy, you can sync it with another great tool, Aeon Timeline . It would take a long time to explain all the benefits of this app for historical novelists, so I’ll leave it to you to go and check it out. The good news is that neither of these apps is very expensive.

Of course, spreadsheets work too, if that’s your comfort zone. But I recommend at least giving these tools a look.

What you’ll probably find when you start organizing all your research is that having to do so gives a good view of what’s essential and what’s not. You can keep it all, but putting it in folders by priority or time span is a sanity preserver.

Do the Research, but Write the Book

My tips above won’t let you off the hook for doing good, solid research. But they may help you give yourself permission to be more focused, to not have to know absolutely everything.

Sure, you’ll write along and discover a gap in your knowledge that you need to fill in order to tie something together or provide a motivation—or just move your characters around from place to place. So be it.

Do that research when the need arises, don’t try to anticipate every eventuality at the start. It’s all about giving yourself permission.

You want to get that draft written. I want you to get that draft written. So embrace the limits and get organized!

Where do you get stuck in the research process? What tips have helped you learn when to stop, so you can get back to your writing? Share in the comments .

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3 Research Hacks for Your Novel

Guest post by Dave Chesson

Research can make or break your novel.

When readers choose your book, they expect to be transported into a believable and engrossing world.

Research is the key to creating an immersive environment to be enjoyed and savored.

Conversely, a badly researched novel can shatter the suspension of disbelief, causing your reader to lose patience with your book and even leave a negative review.

The importance of research for reader enjoyment and, consequently, author reputation can be seen in the following review of Jerry Jenkins and Tim LaHaye’s novel Kingdom Come .

The reviewer in the above image gave the maximum five-star rating to the novel as a direct result of “remarkable research.”

So how do you carry out the same quality of research for your own work? After all, not all writers are researchers. It can be difficult to know the right way to go about it.

Thankfully, there is no need to reinvent the wheel. Read on to discover three research tips you can use on your novel —from hugely successful authors.

• Know Your Reader, Your Questions, and Your Sources

It’s important to understand what your readers expect from your work before you conduct your research.

After all, information about almost any subject on Earth is readily available. If you’ve ever found yourself going off on tangents and opening new tabs while browsing the web, you know exactly how easy it is to get distracted by the sheer amount of information out there.

Reader Expectation

The time you can dedicate to research is probably limited, so spend that time in the most focused and fruitful way possible. Achieve this by gaining a solid understanding of your readers’ expectations.

Readers of the Left Behind series expect accurate use of Biblical prophecy. Readers of historical war fiction expect to find the correct weapons from that time period.

If you’re unsure of how to best meet reader expectations, try the following:

• If you’ve published in the past , use the feedback you received. What did your readers praise? What did they dislike? Can you get a sense of what they ideally expect from your work?
• If you’re a new author, look at reviews for similar work within your genre. After all, you are likely to sell books to people who buy similar books. Established authors are also likely to have a wealth of feedback you can draw upon.
• Feel free to explicitly ask your readers. If you have a mailing list, solicit feedback on what makes or breaks a book in your genre. If you have a social media presence, conduct a poll.
• Refer to the many avenues people use to voice their opinions to understand what readers love. Check out forums for fans of your genre, fan blogs, reader groups on Facebook, relevant hashtags, and so on.

Formulate Specific Research Questions

Once you understand what will best satisfy your readers, develop a list of specific research questions, based on either your novel outline or the general topic.

This is how bestselling author K.M Weiland carries out her research .

Imagine your main character is an English vicar. You could research this generally, but creating specific questions ensures you’ll include everything important. You can add questions as you go, but having a list to start with will help you remain focused.

Form a list of topics your research will cover, and then create specific questions for each.

Imagine writing a crime novel set in 1920s London. You might choose the following categories with particular questions for each:

• Language. Slang in use at the time? Could people generally write well? Different types of dialect based on occupation/social status?
• Everyday life. How did people spend their time? Common food and drink consumed?
• Geography. How did London in the 1920s differ from today? What about the rest of the country/world? How will this impact your story?

The exact categories and questions will depend upon your genre.

Research Sources

Now consider the best places to find the information you need. You should also have a system in place to collect your findings, such as the research capabilities provided by specialist book writing software . While Google is powerful, it’s by no means your only option. Some useful sources include:

• Wolfram Alpha . Like a genius librarian who quickly and accurately answers almost any question. The image below shows Wolfram Alpha in action.

• Google Scholar . High-quality academic information. Excellent if you want a more believable character or story with a depth of info far beyond a normal search engine.
• Internet Archive . To see how a website used to look, use this. As you can see, it’s possible to view Jerry’s website all the way back to 1999!

• Library of Congress . A rich source of American history. View photos as well as other media. You can also “ask a librarian,” as seen below.
• People: Your Richest Source

Turning to your laptop or smartphone by default when researching can lead to overlooking the richest research source of all — the people around us.

For your novel to be truly great, it should focus on more than just facts. It should contain rich human thoughts and feelings.

Margaret Mitchell based a lot of ‘Gone With the Wind’ on the real stories she’d been told in her childhood about the American Civil War . Her book is not only historically accurate, but it also feels authentic.

Draw On the People In Your Life

• Your family . Ask older relatives what life was like growing up. How much did things cost? Did people speak differently to each other? Ask younger relatives what matters to them. How do they spend time with their friends?
• Your friends. Ask those with different occupations or backgrounds, religions, political stances, etc., for their perspectives. This can make your novel more believable than if you merely guess what different lives are like.
• Strangers. Observe people wherever you go. What are they wearing? How do they talk? Good novelists are constantly watching.
• People online. People reveal a lot about themselves on forums, social media, and their blogs . The gives you the opportunity to research people all over the world you might never otherwise come across.

Aren’t novels simply superb when you the characters feel real ? You can give your own story this level of authenticity by drawing upon the rich experiences of the people in your life.

• Travel For Research

Nothing beats actually visiting the place you will write about .

Bestselling thriller and nonfiction author Joanna Penn advocates journeying to your book’s location and getting a firsthand feel for it. This may seem impossible on your budget, but think outside the box:

• Travel during less popular times of the year. Check out a site like Skyscanner and compare airline prices.
• If you can’t afford to go to your specific location, choose somewhere similar but cheaper. Just fact check your research against the actual city to avoid inaccuracies.
• The next best thing to actually being there in person is virtual travel. Google Maps gives you a street view walk around almost anywhere on Earth. You can see the buildings and even what people are wearing.
• Watch documentaries on your location on YouTube or a similar site.

Other Internet Resources

• TripAdvisor . See what real people thought about the attractions, restaurants, and accommodation of cities all over the world.
• Travel Blogs . High-quality posts provide reports to inform and inspire your writing . Many also contain brilliant photos that will help when writing your descriptive passages.
• Travel Forums . Forums allow you to ask about a particular place from a wide range of people who’ve been there. This is a great option if there’s a particular detail you can’t find anywhere else.
• Author Research — What’s Your Personal Process?

Effective author research comes down to:

• Choosing careful questions and sources based on reader expectations
• Making the most of the life experiences of the people around us
• Exploring a book’s location, either firsthand, on the Internet, or by interviewing others

These research tips were suggested by bestselling authors. What’s your favorite research idea? Do you have a personal process you like? I’d love to hear about it in the comments.

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10 essential research tips for historical fiction writers

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Welcome to the Purdue OWL

This page is brought to you by the OWL at Purdue University. When printing this page, you must include the entire legal notice.

Copyright ©1995-2018 by The Writing Lab & The OWL at Purdue and Purdue University. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, reproduced, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed without permission. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our terms and conditions of fair use.

MLA Style specifies guidelines for formatting manuscripts and citing research in writing. MLA Style also provides writers with a system for referencing their sources through parenthetical citation in their essays and Works Cited pages. 

Writers who properly use MLA also build their credibility by demonstrating accountability to their source material. Most importantly, the use of MLA style can protect writers from accusations of plagiarism, which is the purposeful or accidental uncredited use of source material produced by other writers. 

If you are asked to use MLA format, be sure to consult the  MLA Handbook  (9th edition). Publishing scholars and graduate students should also consult the  MLA Style Manual and Guide to Scholarly Publishing  (3rd edition). The  MLA Handbook  is available in most writing centers and reference libraries. It is also widely available in bookstores, libraries, and at the MLA web site. See the Additional Resources section of this page for a list of helpful books and sites about using MLA Style.

Paper Format

The preparation of papers and manuscripts in MLA Style is covered in part four of the  MLA Style Manual . Below are some basic guidelines for formatting a paper in  MLA Style :

General Guidelines

• Type your paper on a computer and print it out on standard, white 8.5 x 11-inch paper.
• Double-space the text of your paper and use a legible font (e.g. Times New Roman). Whatever font you choose, MLA recommends that the regular and italics type styles contrast enough that they are each distinct from one another. The font size should be 12 pt.
• Leave only one space after periods or other punctuation marks (unless otherwise prompted by your instructor).
• Set the margins of your document to 1 inch on all sides.
• Indent the first line of each paragraph one half-inch from the left margin. MLA recommends that you use the “Tab” key as opposed to pushing the space bar five times.
• Create a header that numbers all pages consecutively in the upper right-hand corner, one-half inch from the top and flush with the right margin. (Note: Your instructor may ask that you omit the number on your first page. Always follow your instructor's guidelines.)
• Use italics throughout your essay to indicate the titles of longer works and, only when absolutely necessary, provide emphasis.
• If you have any endnotes, include them on a separate page before your Works Cited page. Entitle the section Notes (centered, unformatted).

Formatting the First Page of Your Paper

• Do not make a title page for your paper unless specifically requested or the paper is assigned as a group project. In the case of a group project, list all names of the contributors, giving each name its own line in the header, followed by the remaining MLA header requirements as described below. Format the remainder of the page as requested by the instructor.
• In the upper left-hand corner of the first page, list your name, your instructor's name, the course, and the date. Again, be sure to use double-spaced text.
• Double space again and center the title. Do not underline, italicize, or place your title in quotation marks. Write the title in Title Case (standard capitalization), not in all capital letters.
• Use quotation marks and/or italics when referring to other works in your title, just as you would in your text. For example:  Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas  as Morality Play; Human Weariness in "After Apple Picking"
• Double space between the title and the first line of the text.
• Create a header in the upper right-hand corner that includes your last name, followed by a space with a page number. Number all pages consecutively with Arabic numerals (1, 2, 3, 4, etc.), one-half inch from the top and flush with the right margin. (Note: Your instructor or other readers may ask that you omit the last name/page number header on your first page. Always follow instructor guidelines.)

Here is a sample of the first page of a paper in MLA style:

The First Page of an MLA Paper

Section Headings

Writers sometimes use section headings to improve a document’s readability. These sections may include individual chapters or other named parts of a book or essay.

MLA recommends that when dividing an essay into sections you number those sections with an Arabic number and a period followed by a space and the section name.

MLA does not have a prescribed system of headings for books (for more information on headings, please see page 146 in the MLA Style Manual and Guide to Scholarly Publishing , 3rd edition). If you are only using one level of headings, meaning that all of the sections are distinct and parallel and have no additional sections that fit within them, MLA recommends that these sections resemble one another grammatically. For instance, if your headings are typically short phrases, make all of the headings short phrases (and not, for example, full sentences). Otherwise, the formatting is up to you. It should, however, be consistent throughout the document.

If you employ multiple levels of headings (some of your sections have sections within sections), you may want to provide a key of your chosen level headings and their formatting to your instructor or editor.

Sample Section Headings

The following sample headings are meant to be used only as a reference. You may employ whatever system of formatting that works best for you so long as it remains consistent throughout the document.

Formatted, unnumbered:

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• How to Write a Literature Review | Guide, Examples, & Templates

How to Write a Literature Review | Guide, Examples, & Templates

Published on January 2, 2023 by Shona McCombes . Revised on September 11, 2023.

What is a literature review? A literature review is a survey of scholarly sources on a specific topic. It provides an overview of current knowledge, allowing you to identify relevant theories, methods, and gaps in the existing research that you can later apply to your paper, thesis, or dissertation topic .

There are five key steps to writing a literature review:

• Search for relevant literature
• Evaluate sources
• Identify themes, debates, and gaps
• Outline the structure
• Write your literature review

A good literature review doesn’t just summarize sources—it analyzes, synthesizes , and critically evaluates to give a clear picture of the state of knowledge on the subject.

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Table of contents

What is the purpose of a literature review, examples of literature reviews, step 1 – search for relevant literature, step 2 – evaluate and select sources, step 3 – identify themes, debates, and gaps, step 4 – outline your literature review’s structure, step 5 – write your literature review, free lecture slides, other interesting articles, frequently asked questions, introduction.

• Quick Run-through
• Step 1 & 2

When you write a thesis , dissertation , or research paper , you will likely have to conduct a literature review to situate your research within existing knowledge. The literature review gives you a chance to:

• Demonstrate your familiarity with the topic and its scholarly context
• Develop a theoretical framework and methodology for your research
• Position your work in relation to other researchers and theorists
• Show how your research addresses a gap or contributes to a debate
• Evaluate the current state of research and demonstrate your knowledge of the scholarly debates around your topic.

Writing literature reviews is a particularly important skill if you want to apply for graduate school or pursue a career in research. We’ve written a step-by-step guide that you can follow below.

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Writing literature reviews can be quite challenging! A good starting point could be to look at some examples, depending on what kind of literature review you’d like to write.

• Example literature review #1: “Why Do People Migrate? A Review of the Theoretical Literature” ( Theoretical literature review about the development of economic migration theory from the 1950s to today.)
• Example literature review #2: “Literature review as a research methodology: An overview and guidelines” ( Methodological literature review about interdisciplinary knowledge acquisition and production.)
• Example literature review #3: “The Use of Technology in English Language Learning: A Literature Review” ( Thematic literature review about the effects of technology on language acquisition.)
• Example literature review #4: “Learners’ Listening Comprehension Difficulties in English Language Learning: A Literature Review” ( Chronological literature review about how the concept of listening skills has changed over time.)

You can also check out our templates with literature review examples and sample outlines at the links below.

Download Word doc Download Google doc

Before you begin searching for literature, you need a clearly defined topic .

If you are writing the literature review section of a dissertation or research paper, you will search for literature related to your research problem and questions .

Make a list of keywords

Start by creating a list of keywords related to your research question. Include each of the key concepts or variables you’re interested in, and list any synonyms and related terms. You can add to this list as you discover new keywords in the process of your literature search.

• Social media, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, TikTok
• Body image, self-perception, self-esteem, mental health
• Generation Z, teenagers, adolescents, youth

Search for relevant sources

Use your keywords to begin searching for sources. Some useful databases to search for journals and articles include:

• Your university’s library catalogue
• Google Scholar
• Project Muse (humanities and social sciences)
• Medline (life sciences and biomedicine)
• EconLit (economics)
• Inspec (physics, engineering and computer science)

You can also use boolean operators to help narrow down your search.

Make sure to read the abstract to find out whether an article is relevant to your question. When you find a useful book or article, you can check the bibliography to find other relevant sources.

You likely won’t be able to read absolutely everything that has been written on your topic, so it will be necessary to evaluate which sources are most relevant to your research question.

For each publication, ask yourself:

• What question or problem is the author addressing?
• What are the key concepts and how are they defined?
• What are the key theories, models, and methods?
• Does the research use established frameworks or take an innovative approach?
• What are the results and conclusions of the study?
• How does the publication relate to other literature in the field? Does it confirm, add to, or challenge established knowledge?
• What are the strengths and weaknesses of the research?

Make sure the sources you use are credible , and make sure you read any landmark studies and major theories in your field of research.

You can use our template to summarize and evaluate sources you’re thinking about using. Click on either button below to download.

Take notes and cite your sources

As you read, you should also begin the writing process. Take notes that you can later incorporate into the text of your literature review.

It is important to keep track of your sources with citations to avoid plagiarism . It can be helpful to make an annotated bibliography , where you compile full citation information and write a paragraph of summary and analysis for each source. This helps you remember what you read and saves time later in the process.

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To begin organizing your literature review’s argument and structure, be sure you understand the connections and relationships between the sources you’ve read. Based on your reading and notes, you can look for:

• Trends and patterns (in theory, method or results): do certain approaches become more or less popular over time?
• Themes: what questions or concepts recur across the literature?
• Debates, conflicts and contradictions: where do sources disagree?
• Pivotal publications: are there any influential theories or studies that changed the direction of the field?
• Gaps: what is missing from the literature? Are there weaknesses that need to be addressed?

This step will help you work out the structure of your literature review and (if applicable) show how your own research will contribute to existing knowledge.

• Most research has focused on young women.
• There is an increasing interest in the visual aspects of social media.
• But there is still a lack of robust research on highly visual platforms like Instagram and Snapchat—this is a gap that you could address in your own research.

There are various approaches to organizing the body of a literature review. Depending on the length of your literature review, you can combine several of these strategies (for example, your overall structure might be thematic, but each theme is discussed chronologically).

Chronological

The simplest approach is to trace the development of the topic over time. However, if you choose this strategy, be careful to avoid simply listing and summarizing sources in order.

Try to analyze patterns, turning points and key debates that have shaped the direction of the field. Give your interpretation of how and why certain developments occurred.

If you have found some recurring central themes, you can organize your literature review into subsections that address different aspects of the topic.

For example, if you are reviewing literature about inequalities in migrant health outcomes, key themes might include healthcare policy, language barriers, cultural attitudes, legal status, and economic access.

Methodological

If you draw your sources from different disciplines or fields that use a variety of research methods , you might want to compare the results and conclusions that emerge from different approaches. For example:

• Look at what results have emerged in qualitative versus quantitative research
• Discuss how the topic has been approached by empirical versus theoretical scholarship
• Divide the literature into sociological, historical, and cultural sources

Theoretical

A literature review is often the foundation for a theoretical framework . You can use it to discuss various theories, models, and definitions of key concepts.

You might argue for the relevance of a specific theoretical approach, or combine various theoretical concepts to create a framework for your research.

Like any other academic text , your literature review should have an introduction , a main body, and a conclusion . What you include in each depends on the objective of your literature review.

The introduction should clearly establish the focus and purpose of the literature review.

Depending on the length of your literature review, you might want to divide the body into subsections. You can use a subheading for each theme, time period, or methodological approach.

As you write, you can follow these tips:

• Summarize and synthesize: give an overview of the main points of each source and combine them into a coherent whole
• Analyze and interpret: don’t just paraphrase other researchers — add your own interpretations where possible, discussing the significance of findings in relation to the literature as a whole
• Critically evaluate: mention the strengths and weaknesses of your sources
• Write in well-structured paragraphs: use transition words and topic sentences to draw connections, comparisons and contrasts

In the conclusion, you should summarize the key findings you have taken from the literature and emphasize their significance.

When you’ve finished writing and revising your literature review, don’t forget to proofread thoroughly before submitting. Not a language expert? Check out Scribbr’s professional proofreading services !

This article has been adapted into lecture slides that you can use to teach your students about writing a literature review.

Scribbr slides are free to use, customize, and distribute for educational purposes.

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If you want to know more about the research process , methodology , research bias , or statistics , make sure to check out some of our other articles with explanations and examples.

• Sampling methods
• Simple random sampling
• Stratified sampling
• Cluster sampling
• Likert scales
• Reproducibility

 Statistics

• Null hypothesis
• Statistical power
• Probability distribution
• Effect size
• Poisson distribution

Research bias

• Optimism bias
• Cognitive bias
• Implicit bias
• Hawthorne effect
• Anchoring bias
• Explicit bias

A literature review is a survey of scholarly sources (such as books, journal articles, and theses) related to a specific topic or research question .

It is often written as part of a thesis, dissertation , or research paper , in order to situate your work in relation to existing knowledge.

There are several reasons to conduct a literature review at the beginning of a research project:

• To familiarize yourself with the current state of knowledge on your topic
• To ensure that you’re not just repeating what others have already done
• To identify gaps in knowledge and unresolved problems that your research can address
• To develop your theoretical framework and methodology
• To provide an overview of the key findings and debates on the topic

Writing the literature review shows your reader how your work relates to existing research and what new insights it will contribute.

The literature review usually comes near the beginning of your thesis or dissertation . After the introduction , it grounds your research in a scholarly field and leads directly to your theoretical framework or methodology .

A literature review is a survey of credible sources on a topic, often used in dissertations , theses, and research papers . Literature reviews give an overview of knowledge on a subject, helping you identify relevant theories and methods, as well as gaps in existing research. Literature reviews are set up similarly to other  academic texts , with an introduction , a main body, and a conclusion .

An  annotated bibliography is a list of  source references that has a short description (called an annotation ) for each of the sources. It is often assigned as part of the research process for a  paper .  

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• How to protect yourself and others. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/prevent-getting-sick/prevention.html. Accessed Jan. 10, 2024.
• Use and care of masks. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/prevent-getting-sick/about-face-coverings.html. Accessed Jan. 10, 2024.
• Masking during travel. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/travel/page/masks. Accessed Jan. 10, 2024.
• COVID-19 testing: What you need to know. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/symptoms-testing/testing.html. Accessed Dec. 20, 2023.
• At-home OTC COVID-19 diagnostic tests. U.S. Food and Drug Administration. https://www.fda.gov/medical-devices/coronavirus-covid-19-and-medical-devices/home-otc-covid-19-diagnostic-tests. Accessed Jan. 22, 2024.

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