Proximity Muse

Every writer has a head full of useless facts and zany trivia. We pound so much garbage into our skulls that some of it is bound to stick. When I know something random and someone asks me how I know, I’m frequently forced to admit I have no idea. Every once in awhile, though, I’m at least able to say that I know because it was part of the research I did for Project X. So research, yeah. That’s what this post is about. It just took me awhile to get there. Specifically, we are gonna talk about using the Interwebs. Start by memorizing this phrase. Just Fucking Google It.

How Much?

How much research needs to be done depends entirely on what you are writing and what your audience is. If I’m writing short pulp stories in the vein of Two-Fisted Tales, the amount of research I’m gonna need to do will be light. I may need to know how to spell the name of some exotic locale properly (hey, that is research), what sort of folks live there and what the nastiest animal around is. That should take like 20 minutes, tops. I’m not gonna be taking a ton of notes (though I make some bookmarks for later reference), because the genre doesn’t really require a great deal of verisimilitude. Now, if I’m doing a freelance bit for the WWF (environmentalists, not wrestlers) and they want me to write about the same area, I’m gonna need to dig a little deeper. I’m gonna need to spend more time reading, more time documenting sources and more time making sure of the quality of my sources. This seems like common sense, yeah? Do the amount of research your work requires – don’t be lazy – but don’t do more than you need too.

Where?

Wikipedia. There I said it. It has a lot of good information that can help you get started with your research. If nothing else, Wikipedia should give you an overview of whatever you’re researching. Obviously, you don’t want to take everything posted on Wikipedia as the absolute truth, but a reasonable amount of the content is sourced. Go look at the sources. Them things is gold mines, son. I use Wikipedia to find sources that are more reliable. Those sources generally lead to other sources, and so on. I’d also suggest working on your Google-fu. I’ve found full academic .pdf files online that my professors said they couldn’t get hold of. No, I’m not advocating piracy here (arrr!) I’m just saying know how to work the system.

Here’s an example of how to work the system and find obscure shit. Let’s say I want to find a picture of Chuck Wendig naked. Stop making that face at me, it’s hypothetical. Fine. A poem about Chuckles naked form then. The worst thing you could ever do is type “Chuck Wendig naked poem” into the browser. I don’t know what you’d find and I don’t want too. My guess would be pictures of woodchucks banging to bluegrass music. I digress. The important part of a poem about naked Wendigs isn’t the naked part. The internet loves the word naked so much that you’ll get 3 million hits on crap that has nothing to do with a nude Chuck (I’m guessing here). You need to learn what sort of words Google likes but doesn’t love. A better search would be “poem chuck wendig artistic” or “poems about chuck wendig.” Either of those should let you find what you want, assuming such content actually exists.

Plagiarism

Just because I can’t spell the word doesn’t mean you don’t need to watch out for it. I know how tempting it is to just copy/paste stuff directly from a site into your work. Resist. Even if that wasn’t completely unethical, the internet is filled with millions of howler monkeys looking out for exactly what you just did. God forbid you ever become famous and someone finds that shit. We’ll never hear the end of it. Make the information work for you, don’t just work the information.

NOTE: No poems or pictures of naked Wendigs were produced during the making of this post.