For a year now, I’ve been collecting pictures, web clippings, video files, and anything else even vaguely related to the novel I’ve had in mind. Ironically, the reason I’ve had such a hard time getting into this book is because it’s set at a particular time in history (Cold War Canada, specifically 1967), so I felt intimidated by all I don’t know about the period and its events. (I wasn’t even born for another year!)
The solution in this, as perhaps in all things, was to ask myself questions. Small questions. The result of one of those questions was the realisation that I needed to break all this research down into digestible bits; there was no way I could just absorb it all at once.
I’ve been using the great Scrivener app to gather my background material, because I’ve been finding it so useful in my copywriting and it’s really designed with novels in mind. Still, there are just so many files in there, and while random access (“dip in anywhere”) was a great speed-boost in computing, it’s not a great way to think through things.
Scrivener makes it easy to print out a 3×5 notecard for every file, so that’s what I did (and naturally I also made dividers, tabs, and a box for them all).
Now I’m going to go through each file and boil it down to the information that’s relevant to the story. All of this is before making final decisions about the plot and characters, because the research inevitably spawns new ideas. So, about those elements, I keep reminding myself you don’t have to know this yet.
The up-side of living in an info-deluvium age is that, when it’s time, I can likely find whatever facts I’m missing (like the weather on any given day, which is a good bit of detail to add, as Canada is not California!).
Ultimately, though, there’s a point where one just has to commit to creating a work of fiction. I don’t want to be too careful here or the whole thing will be boring — for me and for the reader. In fact, come that point I want to set my homework on fire and dance over the flames.