Have a strange physical symptom? Legal troubles? Can’t figure out what movie that actor played in last year? Or maybe you want to make sure when you describe the historical plantation house in your novel you don’t make a mistake and give it modern details?
Let me just Google that.
But how much research is too much? If I spend hours and read countless documents researching an event that occurred in history, only to write approximately one page in my manuscript mentioning said event is that obsessive or just good writing? Am I procrastinating? Or just addicted to trivial details? Do I ask too many questions after I’ve had several cups of coffee in the morning? I suspect so.
I am the Google Queen. Now where’s my crown?
Sometimes I worry that the cops are going to show up at my door and ask why I Google things like, "A logical way to dispose of a body." And other messed up things that, I swear, have nothing to do with me!
ReplyDeleteThe Internet is definitely both the writer's friend and enemy. I can't imagine the nightmare research must have been pre-Internet. Talk about a time-waster! What we can now access at the click of a mouse button used to require hours of phone calls and interviews. However, the flip side of that is that we have so much information available to us, it's easy to get caught up in researching and learning about things and waste valuable writing time.
ReplyDeleteI can lose an afternoon by getting sucked into the Google vortex. Researching those details is important, though. My story has taken some interesting new turns because of some obscure detail I turned up in the research. I'll bet yours has too. But that's good, right?
ReplyDeleteOh, and I just Googled it. Your crown got delivered to Wikipedia by mistake. Oops. They're sending some Yahoo over to pick it up this afternoon.
I don't really do that much online researching for my MSs, which is good, because in my university days, I was the type to spend 6 months researching and then change my mind and do a completely different thesis which I put off til I had only 3 days to do it. lol.
ReplyDeleteBut google is fun. I use it to find pics for my characters. I need pics because I don't pay attention to visual details and my character is likely to be fat when the bok starts, skinny in the middle and fat again at the end. lol