The Unemployed Writer

Step four is probably the least static of any step you might take in the composition of said masterpiece. It’s a short stop on the way to starting, but it never actually ends. You’re always going to be stuck here, looking back to Wiki and figure out a quick and easy answer to how many types of spider monkeys there are in the tropics (13 by the way) for your serial killer zoo keeper novel.

So, what are the keys to the process, if any at all. First off, you want to write a good story, you need to be sure of what you’re writing. Going back to the spider monkeys, you want to make sure you actually know what they eat. If you say they eat leaves, when they really eat 90% fruit and nuts, some zoologist somewhere is going to notice and write you a note that wastes your time. Not everyone knows the difference, but you get the idea. For those that do, your failure to research is distracting. Don’t distract your reader with lazy writing. And if it’s less specified knowledge, like say something political or the date of someone’s birth, or words from another language, more than a few people will know that you didn’t take the time to get it right.

Laziness will kill a novel as quickly as bad writing (quicker if you can pull off both). So, how do you keep track of your facts. You haven’t even started writing yet, so what are you researching. It makes good solid sense to have a basic idea about a topic before you start writing.

Your zookeeper has a lot of knowledge that you don’t. He’d kick your ass on jeopardy. Wipe the floor with you and send you home crying. But your reader won’t know this unless you start doing a little research to write all that superior knowledge into your piece. He needs to know things that you don’t already know and so you need to go and find those things. Read some books about animals. You’re not going to know anything if you don’t at least pretend. So dig out a few zoology books, some Doctor Doolittle, those Zoo Books from elementary school, whatever you think you need to write convincingly about a zoologist in a serious novel.

And then keep all those resources around as well as bookmarks to Wikipedia articles and a quick draw on Google and you should be good to go. Remember, you don’t need to actually know anything, just have the capacity to lift knowledge and use it carefully in prose.