Research is important when you are writing, but is can also become an ever growing time waster. If you are like me, when you want to learn about something, you look it up on the internet. Before you know it, you have spent an hour reading page after page about rock gardens and how to build them. This is an hour that you could have spent writing your novel. This is time that could have been spent creating something that could be researched and edited later.

If you know a little about what you are researching, just write through it. Make a Note in red in the area where you know that you are going to have to come back and add to. This way you will be able to continue writing that first draft and won’t loose the precious time you need to get that first draft finished.

If you absolutely need to know something to move your plot forward, by all means look it up. I would suggest that you look it up at Wikipedia.com, find the quick and dirty information and continue writing your novel. Keep to the one source. This will minimize the amount of time you are doing your research and get you right back on to that first draft. Again, leave yourself a note in another color to come back later and expand on this thought, when you have the time to go back and do more research.

Remember, it does not matter how bad your first draft is. All you want to do is get the story down on paper. Once that is done, you can go back and make the changes you know are needed and add the researched information that will give adequate depth to your novel.

See More Writing Tips.

If you have other ideas on how to find story ideas, write a comment. I would love to hear how you are inspired.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 22nd, 2009 at 6:00 pm and is filed under Writing Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.