Last month I reached out to my Tumblr buddies looking for questions to use in my blog post. This was one of them:

Frost asks ~ Being the master of research that you appear to be (The Google is strong with this one) have you ever had research destroy a plot-line you had in your head? Or at least been forced to seriously reconsider an element of the story?

The first thing I have to say is thank you. I refer to myself as a Google genius (in jest, of course) and while it really is a self-professed title I do spend a hell-ton of time researching plot lines, character names, points of interest and, yes, as much as it embarrasses me to admit it, occasionally people. (As a side note, you would be surprised how much information you can find when you go looking for it in the right way. Google has this amazing way of picking up the intricacies of the things its users like to search for and once it gets to know you, it drills down the masses of information into the kind of links that it knows you prefer. I have no idea how it does this but I’m not entirely convinced that there isn’t magic involved. Or aliens.)

Regardless, research tools can only work as well as a person uses it. So it can tell you a whole heck of a lot about ignitions and locking steering wheels, but if you decide halfway through your novel to change the model of the car you’re using, it isn’t bright enough to read your mind and tell you that you ought to be reviewing the differences between the original car and your new one. Speaking purely hypothetically, of course.

But I digress, because the question was not ‘how do I research?’ but what does research do to my plot lines. The short answer to your question, Frost, is no. But yes. Let me explain…

When I first start researching a novel it’s usually because I’ve had an idea, but at this point in the process that idea is nothing more than a word, a phrase, or a concept. Magicians. Heart attack. Early 70s glam rocker. Dead guy. In other words, there’s very little story – there is just this open-ended, vaguely-shaped idea of a maybe-story. Sometimes it moves forward, sometimes it doesn’t. See, for me, the process of researching is kind of like prodding at a tooth with your tongue when you’ve just started to notice an odd ache. It could turn out to be nothing but a chunk of popcorn kernel wedged into the gum line (find it, spit it out, and forget about it)… or it could be the warning sign that you got an eight-hundred dollar visit to the dentist in your future. Maybe that analogy isn’t the greatest of ones, I don’t mean to compare my novels to a root canal, but the point I’m trying to make is that I never know what I’m going to end up with until I start digging.

My research usually starts with an image search; a generic, unfiltered, shot-in-the-dark search of the phrase/word/idea that’s popped into my head. (Early 70’s glam rocker was most inspiring on the image side of things – dead guy, not so much.) If I can move away from that and actually start writing something, a paragraph or eight about where this idea might be going, and if I can then present these words to my beta reader and garner a decent reaction on them, I’ll move on to the next step wherein the details have to be researched. And so on, and so on, and so on.

Okay, okay, I know… I’m back to the how again, but I swear this is me answering your question: if I can’t get inspired by the research there’s a good chance I’m going to walk away from the idea.

So, no, research has never stopped me from writing a plot line that’s stuck in my head (as almost ever writer will tell you that once an idea has seeded it’s harder to get rid of than crab grass). But yes, it has stopped me from getting to the point where the plot gets a chance to root.

However, there is one more thing I feel like I need to tack on to this, and what I’m about to tell you is a concept that is either staunchly supported, or adamantly admonished by authors/readers/editors depending on their opinion of the subject… There have been things I’ve found while researching that I’ve simply chosen not to add to my novel. In other words, there are realities that I have come across in the process of researching that might have turned me away from the plot line if I felt compelled to include them. Fortunately I never feel compelled to include anything. I am quite fond of my creative license and I have no issue with digging that baby out of my wallet and tossing it down whenever the need arises. If we look back at Honour, for example, I was more than aware that the church, especially in a historical viewpoint, played a significant and overbearing role within the monarchy. That didn’t work for my romance novel so I chose to ignore that reality completely. To quote a line I read recently in the author’s notes of a Stephen King novel, “That’s why we call it fiction.”

If there’s any advice I can give with respect to writing it is this: let your research work for you, and work with you, but don’t ever let it control your creative processes.

Until next time,

AF Henley <3

Henley was born with a full-blown passion for run-on sentences, a zealous indulgence in all words descriptive, and the endearing tendency to overuse punctuation. Since the early years Henley has been an enthusiastic writer, from the first few I-love-my-dog stories to the current leap into erotica. A self-professed Google genius, Henley lives for the hours spent digging through the Internet for ‘research purposes’ which, more often than not, lead seven thousand miles away from first intentions but bring Henley to new discoveries and ideas that, once seeded, tend to flourish.

Henley has been proudly publishing with Less Than Three Press since 2012, and has been writing like mad ever since—an indentured servant to the belief that romance and true love can mend the most broken soul. Even when presented in prose.

Henley’s newest release, Baby’s on Fire hit the market on May 6th and is now available at your favourite online book retailer. Check it out on Amazon, or directly through LT3 Press: ebook, print.

For more information please stop by for a visit at afhenley.com.