I love research.

The first thing I did when I decided to write the Lancaster’s Luck series as a steampunk world was cheer and rub my hands together, before rushing off to read up on steampunk’s history, the steampunk aesthetic, coffee making, Egyptology… on anything I could think of that might be even vaguely related. I listened to steampunk bands, even, and discovered a new fannish love in Steam Powered Giraffe. When it came to the Taking Shield series, I was looking up such wonderfully esoteric things as interferometric dispersion, what actually happens if an airlock blows out in a vacuum, and sketching out on paper how the Gyrfalcon’s hangars and launch tubes work.

Right now, I’m working on something that has me reading up on topics as diverse as the Antikythera Mechanism and the scandal that hit the Mecklenburg-Schwerin family in the 1890s (hint: it involved a handsome footman). Wonderful variety, wonderful chances to learn new stuff. Truly, I just love research.

Partly for its own sake, because I find it innately satisfying to learn when women athletes were first allowed into the Olympics (the second modern Olympiad in 1900 in Paris, as it happens) or how a naval flag office works. But mostly because it helps me visualise and describe the worlds I’m building, and because those worlds are stronger and more vivid from the details I’ve been able to add to them.

The trick is to know what to put in (only just enough) and what to leave out (probably most of it). Feed through enough detail to give a created world completeness and coherence and make the narrative three dimensional and rich. Do it right and the little gems of knowledge inform the story, threaded through it like little gems, catching at the reader’s attention—hopefully subtly and naturally. It makes the world live. It’s all about balance: blending imagination with all those collected ‘facts and stuff’, and seed the details through the narrative so quietly and seamlessly a reader just sees the whole, complete world.

And if you’re like me, half the fun is sharing research with readers. There are a ton of ways of doing that: an author’s note, Pinterest, blog posts, website background notes, a slideshow, book trailers… The ways of sharing these fascinating world-building snippets have gone well beyond the old days when all you got was a fold-out map at the end of a book.

Are you a writer? How do you store and use the fruits of your research? And readers, do you like delving into all this geeky stuff?

Share your views!

About Anna

Anna was a communications specialist for many years, working in various UK government departments on everything from marketing employment schemes to organizing conferences for 10,000 civil servants to running an internal TV service. These days, though, she is writing full time. She lives with her husband in a quiet village tucked deep in the Nottinghamshire countryside. She’s supported there by the Deputy Editor, aka Molly the cockerpoo, who is assisted by the lovely Mavis, a Yorkie-Bichon cross with a bark several sizes larger than she is but no opinion whatsoever on the placement of semi-colons.

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