When I first began writing seriously (meaning past naming characters, putting them in designer clothing and making up some dialogue), I never did research. I sat in a cold, concrete floored room at the back of The Ditch and wrote what I knew.
Pages upon pages of what I knew.
Then, I began to make outlandish things up.
And I filled pages upon pages with words.
I never sat around thinking, "Hey, I don't know enough about that, I should look it up."
Granted, this was the day and age before the internet was in your hand at all times, but the Internet was a happening thing and I believe I sometimes ventured over to use it to research things whilst still in high school. I know I used it in college.
I hated the internet.
I'm honest. I hated with with a flaming passion because I could NEVER find what I wanted. Throughout college, I sat in the dusty library and did my research using books that sometimes hadn't seen the light of day since the sixties.
And I still wrote.
Still filled pages of notebook paper with words, still typed Word docs filled with stories and characters I grew to love.
But, never once did I research anything passed maybe looking up a meaning of a name I was unable to find within one of the numerous baby name books I own.
It never occurred to me that as a writer of works of fiction, I'd have to do research, have to do something similar to what I did when writing an essay for school.
Then, one day, my mother informed me I ought to "look something up" so it sounded like I knew what I was talking about. I do not remember WHAT she told me to look up, only she created a monster.
I am a research monster now.
I'm still not any good at it, the internet still fails ninety five percent of the time to tell me what I want it to tell me, but I research everything now. Hours of my life are wasted on various websites looking up random bits of information. I've spent time hunting down slang used in the Old West for ONE SENTENCE. I've wasted time trying to find how a British person would say "crazy" in the twenties. I spent an hour trying to find out when the rollerball pen was invented and how widely used it was in the 1940s. I spent at least two days searching floor plans online till I finally gave up and made my own-- just so I could describe something better. I've lost track of how many time I've made sure the stupid pop culture reference I've made actually would be known by certain characters and are the right time period.
It's a lot of freaking work.
And that's just for the fan fiction I've been working on as if recent.
Last summer I spent days on end looking at school catalogues to get ideas for course to stick students in. I've wasted hours making sure the schedules I made for them actually worked. I've spent years trying to figure out what colleges some of my characters are going to attend, though I don't plan to actually write about them IN college. I've spent days staring at a map of Glasgow on a real estate site trying to find a flat. For a fictional character. (I did find one. Well, two. Then I merged them, as what I wanted doesn't actual exist.) I've scoured the internet for images of interiors so I'd have a good idea how to describe them. (One day just to find out they'd remodeled the building I was trying to write about so I really had to just use what was in my head. No one thought to take pictures of the fourth floor Adam Smith lecture hall before they redid it...)
Hours of my life were lost when I was working on HYRM and I got lost in a world of quotes. Quotes ate me alive for days on end.
Many of the clever things I come up with in my original works as well as my fan fics no one bothers to really take note of...it's like I always thought: no one notices. They are reading and enjoying the story-- not looking for symbolism, not looking for those little things.
Then, I got feedback when someone noticed the painstaking effort I put forth.
One of my stories follows two real people, who are quite famous. I went back to my roots in my fan fics and started writing about actual people instead of fictional ones. I had the idea in my head for awhile and it wanted out, so I let it out. Yeah, you might think it is rather teenybopper of me, and I think it is, but I like the two OCs I created and if I REALLY wanted to, I could change the names of the famous people, change the names of projects, etc and it'd be orignal. So, I guess you can say I'm just too lazy to change the inspiration. (10p technically started out as a fan fic, only I changed the main romantic interests name, then his profession, thus, it's not. See? No...that's fine.)
Anyways, I've become somewhat fixated with where these two people WERE. I don't care where they are right now, I care where they WERE. I get caught up in trying to figure it out, till I suddenly realize what I'm doing and I laugh.
I'd be worried if I hadn't done the same thing when I was writing some of my original works. Granted I cannot scurry the internet to figure out where my characters were located, but if you saw the pile of paper I carry around for RAB, you'd see I'm rather keen to know every detail.
It wasn't always like this. Once upon I time, I just made stuff up and called it a day.
(Except that one time when I was in high school and I drew a map of the town RAB takes place in just so I could name the street's D used to get from one end of town to another. I could have just made that up, but...I didn't. I made an entire map. On lots of paper. I still have it and use it too. Well, I did have it...I'm not sure where it got off to now that I think about it. Hopefully it survies the move.)
