Researching the Book Instead of Writing the Book

I'm very good at research. Possibly too good at it. Research has one enormous advantage over writing. You can spend six hours doing it, accomplish absolutely nothing on the manuscript, and still go to bed completely convinced you've had a productive day. Even better, you probably have. That's what makes it dangerous.

Down the Rabbit Hole

To be fair, A Veil Sundered genuinely requires a ridiculous amount of research. I've looked into electromagnetic pulses, coronal mass ejections, power grids, weather, firearms, vehicles, military procedures, survival, geography, road networks, communications, infrastructure, medicine, psychology, and God knows what else. My browser history probably makes me look either remarkably well educated or mildly dangerous. Or unstable. But, I've been tested, so thing are mostly ok. There are things I know now that I had absolutely no reason to know before deciding to write these books, and I regularly find myself reading some obscure technical document thinking, This is fascinating, before remembering that I only needed to know whether one paragraph in Chapter Thirty-Seven made sense. Worldbuilding is even worse because there isn't really an end to it. Witches. Warriors. The Lambent. The Obscura. The Veil. The bond. Metajunctures. The Silence. The Tempest. Every time I answer one question, the answer creates another three. Before I know it, I've spent an entire evening working out the history behind something that won't matter until Book Six while the chapter I was actually supposed to be editing sits untouched.

The Perfect Form of Procrastination The really insidious part is that none of this is wasted effort. The research matters. I don't want to write a post-apocalyptic novel where the survival elements are complete nonsense. I don't want somebody travelling a distance in three hours when it would actually take nine. If I can make the real science believable enough that the fictional leap feels possible, I want to do that. Actually, I must do that. Otherwise my brain will itch, The worldbuilding matters too. Once you decide you're writing ten books, inconsistencies become little landmines waiting for you several hundred thousand words later. So I can research for hours and truthfully tell myself I'm working on the book. That's the perfect lie because it isn't actually a lie.

Research Has Answers

Writing is different. Research is safe. If I don't know something, I can look it up. If I get something wrong, I can correct it. There's usually an answer somewhere. Writing asks much less comfortable questions. Does the scene work? Is the character believable? Is this boring? Will anybody care what happens next? And the big one that sits underneath all of them: Is any of this actually any good? A paper about geomagnetic storms doesn't care whether I can write. But the Manuscript? The manuscript does. So yes, I research because the books need it and because I'm the sort of person who genuinely enjoys understanding how something works before I break it for fictional purposes. But I'm also getting much better at recognising the difference between, I need to research this before I can write it, and, I really don't feel like confronting that chapter tonight, so let's learn everything there is to know about transformers.* Unfortunately, once you know you're doing it, it becomes considerably harder to bullshit yourself. *Not those kinds of Transformers, the other ones. The ones that sit on a pole and can be damaged by an EMP.