Paksworld

Research is part of any writing, fiction or nonfiction.   If you know you’re going to write about shoemakers in New England in colonial times  (just to grab for a topic I know nothing about), you would have a limited topic and your research would need to be “deep”.   If you know you’re going to write a novel set in an invented world (SFnal or fantasy), then your research must be broad and had better be deep in some areas.

But no matter whether your topic is narrow or wide, some of the research you do won’t make it into the book…at least, not into a book anyone will want to read.  Most of us have read a book that “taught us more about penguins than we really wanted to know,”  written by someone who did a lot of research and wanted someone else to share the pain.

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