But What About the Flow?

It may have occurred to you, in this talk about research, that it's not all that easy to include it when you're writing. You could research before you start, true, but what about those things that you don't realize you were going to need, those last-minute things that you realize should be verified in the middle of writing them?

What do you do? Do you stop writing to dig up the fact? Do you wait till your first draft's done, then verify the information?

Stopping in the middle of writing your draft can mess up your flow and harm your writing productivity. Waiting means you can forget that you need to verify the information, or that you can lose the spot that needs verifying. Each method has its downsides.

And each has its places when it must be used. Sometimes the thing to be researched is a major plot element. If your hero's going to be stuck in a dungeon without food or drink, you'll need to find out how long a human can survive without water so you don't write your other characters taking a month to find him "just in time" when he should've been a corpse weeks before that. In that case, you'll want to write till you come to a pause, then dig out the research materials.

In most cases, though, you can wait. Finding that perfect name or word, double-checking that definition, verifying that blueberries are a late summer berry —all of these things are things that can wait till you're either done with your first draft or till you come to a natural writing pause.

But what to do so you know to come back to it and know what you wanted there? I use a rather simple technique: square brackets. Inside those brackets, I put what I was thinking, often in bold. This will end up looking like "[Henry's mother] brought them a plate of cookies."

Since I write on the computer, I later just need to search for "[" within my document, and I'll find all my notes. (In MS Word, you can also use the Comment function if you get long-winded.) The bold helps me find the notes during a quick read-through so I know what needs changing. For some stories I'll color it based on what type of research it is (place name, character name, fact check, worldbuilding detail, et cetera).

This square bracket thing can also work when you're writing and thinking of a word, but you know it's not the right one. Stick the one you're thinking and a note of what you're thinking about the word you actually want in square brackets, and keep going. It may take a calm week to randomly think of the word, but the story will be written without you being stuck on the single word, or name, or whatever.