How many of you remember working on a book, getting to a place where you needed some information about a time, a place, or a situation in order for your story to feel authentic, yet you didn’t have that information? How many of you remember having to drive to the library to find out the facts? How many remember scooting down to your local bookstore and browsing the shelves looking for some book, any book, that could shed light on the rules of baseball in 1890 or the hunting habits of a jaguar in Brazil?
Yes, I’m dating myself, but I’m guessing there’s more than one or two of you out there who can relate. Continue reading “Writing Research in the Digital Age”
When I first sat down and put fingers to keys, full of optimism about being a writer, I looked for suggestions about how to write my first book. Any guesses what I found? The two most overused pieces of advice in writing: “Show, don’t tell,” and “Write what you know.” If writers’ groups were classic rock radio stations, those two pieces of advice would be Stairway to Heaven and Hey Jude. All good enough, as far as it went, but I didn’t even understand what they meant.