Research

It's easy for me to get lost in research - mainly because it's not writing. Though the writing mentor says, 'thinking is writing '- so let's file it under that, and not procrastination, shall we? Great!

But it's also fun - you can, these days, visit places you've never been and find, for example, a boring but believable street location for a character to live using Street View, if you're not writing fantasy. Fantasy must be more demanding, though - you have to massively world-build, and that stuff takes ages to think out, plan and map, I suspect. I have something I want to write set at 58k feet and in the future, which I've already done some research on - and it's so easy to get lost down rabbit holes of connections and "I didn't know that!" or 'What is snow blindness' and just never leave that browser session or library.

Pandora's Secret is set in Costa Rica, Washington, D.C and London. I live near London, but I have never been to the other two locations. So I could have spent hours researching - but I tried not to - not until the vomit draft (what I call the first draft) was done. So, I wrote mostly on the 'write what I know' principle. So Costa Rica? I've been to places like it on holiday; I've got lost walking around small streets, found amazing cafes, tried to park a car in an underground garage, and watched locals dance in flower-surrounded cobbled courtyards. So that's where I started. For Washington, D.C., I'm not ashamed to say I started using what I have seen on TV and in films. Just to paint a broader picture. When I wanted a specific location of a particular office, I turned to Google. The Secret Service, for example, has two head offices in downtown D.C. I needed the exact location of one for a character to head to, and it turned out that there is an administration office near where the Presidential Helicopter (Marine 2) is housed when in D.C.) But that was really it. The rest could wait for the rewrites.

The novel's inciting incident happens in a very specific location - not a where but a what. On a bridge. So I did a little bit of research, which weirdly started with trying to find the bridge the X-Files filmed an episode on that I remember watching - and actually, it led me to the wrong bridge. But on Google Maps this wrong bridge? It looked good, and it was in a believable location, driveable from Washington, D.C., so I went with it. 

And this is where things get weird: later, when I finished the vomit draft, and started editing.

It's the editing that I find myself doing the proper research.

The bridge scene was the first thing a reader would read in the novel at that point. [There would end up being a prologue before it in the end]. So that first chapter had to be spot on.

So I started researching the bridge properly.

It turned out it was bizarrely the perfect spot - because, without giving away spoilers, it seemed an event like what I had written in Pandora's Secret had actually happened there decades ago - the bridge's nickname locally, apparently, was The Cry Baby Bridge - for a reason. You'll have to Google it - I'm not going to say more for fear of giving stuff away [Governor's Bridge, Maryland] - but also, and more exciting for my inner 12-year-old, it was also the location of an urban legend: The Maryland Goatman. It lived under the bridge

So, of course, that had to go in the novel somewhere! 

And it survived for a while like that - until a third or fourth edit, when the writing mentor said it was slowing things down. So it's gone now. Sob.

Two other research things spring to mind - one was the random street and neighbourhood I'd found on Google Maps in a Washington, D.C., suburb for my Secret Service Agent to live. It is apparently an area where some working agents actually live. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised; Washington is an expensive place to live or rent, and my home search was probably similar to what a real search for good places to live and work in downtown D.C. might be? Or it was just random pot luck!

The other was in Costa Rica - there is one mention of where a car is abandoned in an underground parking lot. My research and 1st edit pass revealed that those are rare, and in the town I had set the scene in, there was only one, and it belonged to an expensive hotel. So I had to move it to there. 

Overall, research is great - I love it - but I find it's just so easy to get caught up in it, like doomscrolling on Instagram -  before you know it, you've lost an hour of writing time for the day... and that's why I do most of it at the edit stage.

If you're a writer, when do you do yours? Love to hear from you on any of the socials below.