Research Is Important?

Everyone says, ‘Write what you know,’ but what about what you don’t know? No one can know everything about everything, or everything about anything. Many writers, and artists, are obstinately against research, whether they believe they know everything they’re writing about or not.

Their knowledge can only go so far while crafting a world.

Many writers believe that knowing too much about a topic will flatten the story, but the opposite is true. The more you know about what you are writing, the more detail you can pack into a story. The more detail you pack into a story, the more you can immerse your readers into the world you’ve created.

Research is the allowance to write what you have taught yourself in order to make what you’ve written feel real. The more research, the more what you’ve written can become reality in the eyes of your story. The more you know, the more you can show your readers.

Your audience is most likely looking for a way to be thrown into your story, alongside its characters. The more detail, the more immersed your audiences will be.

Merely making up details and plopping them in does not work for the most part. This doesn’t work because you don’t truly know what you are writing. The way you are writing in details would be too flexible, rather than actualizing them.

Solid knowledge actualizes them because fact is fact, and knowledge is fact. You cannot make falsehoods fact because they do not exist. Even just fact-checking yourself, like knowing whether chocolate is a part of a candy bar or not, will help your work feel like truth.

Again, fact is fact.

You cannot, even in fiction, make your falsehoods fact. It will make the entire world you are building for your audience feel like a lie.

Obviously, the fictional tale you are spinning is a lie, but in order for it to feel real, you need to use truths to help make your lie feel like the truth. If you don’t, your lie you are telling will only feel like a lie.

What’s important is for a series of facts, whether real or fictional, to spin the story you are telling. Spinning lies will only feel like they’re producing a lie, but spinning truths will help you be able to tell a lie that tells the truth.

That’s your goal as a writer: to tell lies that tell the truth.

Doing research gives you the tools to do so, even if it’s only fact-checking what you already know.

Not everyone can possible know everything they are writing about. If you are not fact-checking, and someone knows more than you about what you are writing, it will feel to them like they have been cheated.

It is your job as a writer to know everything you are writing about so that does not happen. This is why research is so important: as a writer, you are obligated to know what you are talking, and writing, about.

Even if you have characters who don’t have the knowledge you have on a subject, the more you know about the same subject, the more it will appear to your audience that your character doesn’t know. The knowledge you have will make the knowledge your character doesn’t have more evident.

Research is the readying of whatever knowledge you need to make sure you know what you’re writing, regardless of your characters’s statuses in your work. A part of writing a world is that none of your characters will have the same amount of knowledge you have. That is one of the most basic parts of writing fiction.

Knowledge is for the writer, and characters coming to now bits and pieces of what the writer knows is a part of creating a story.

Research is the base of allowing yourself to tell the story you want to tell.

Research is the art of knowing what your characters don’t know.