Mark Twain once said, Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please, and this is all what writing a novel is about. As a novelist you have the liberty of distorting facts to fit them into your story line. At the same time, though, you’d like your novel to be believable. You don’t want to lose credit by taking too much liberty.

Tom Clancy once wrote about a nuclear explosion that destroyed Denver, Colorado, and that is absolutely acceptable. After all, it’s called fiction writing. His story would be unbelievable if had described Denver’s harbor located at the Gulf of Mexico. That would be part of insufficient research.

Little details like the location of the MI5 headquarters in London, the types of Chinese military uniforms, the history of the Hopi tribe, the behavioral patterns of wolves, etc. can be easily researched through the vast Internet resources, namely search engines. Reading books on the topic helps, of course, too. Traveling to the location of your novel would help to get a better look & feel of the life and culture there, but let’s face it, unless you have the travel budget of a Dan Brown you won’t make it to Jerusalem or to Lhasa in Tibet. So, in a nut-shell, good research should be an important part of writing your novel. The foundation, still, is your story line.

The “problem” I found with extensive research, though, is the cataloging of references. You may have located some interesting information, but it applies to a chapter that you haven’t written yet, and it may take weeks before you get there. As a result, all of my research literature is filled with little paper bookmarks with notes written on them. Sometimes I write down notes on my computer and save the file as “research.doc”. All in all, I use many .doc files in a folder, dedicated to the current novel, on my computer. They all contain information contributing to the story line.

The best tool to keep track of Internet references (i.e. websites) is Microsoft’s Excel (or the Mac or OpenOffice equivalent). I will not go into further detail about search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc. I’m assuming you are familiar with search engines.

The following screen-shot shows an excerpt from an Excel file I used for my first novel, The Bleeding Hills.

I use the tabs on the bottom to describe the topic, in this case Bloody Sunday, Irish History, Town of Derry, etc. The first column in a sheet contains a short description of the resource (i.e. hyperlink), and the next includes the actual hyperlink. Maintaining an Excel file proved to be an invaluable tool for my research.

As I mentioned in another post, Let’s Write A Novel – Are You Prepared?, I deem it absolutely necessary that each author, published or not, maintains a blog. Not only will it provide a startup boost in terms of people getting to know you, but it is also a perfect tool to store and publish your research. Have a look at my article series The Panchen Lama Controversy which represents part of my research for my third novel, The Eleventh Incarnation.

I hope I could provide some hints, and, since I am not the ultimate source of wisdom, please leave a comment below. I am sure there are more ways of researching, and I would like to read about it.

The Monty Python Code

For those who happened to stumble upon this article per search engine, this particular post is part of an article series Let’s Write A Novel. My intention is to challenge those authors who write about writing a novel. About 99% of these books are filled with inspirational blubbering. Their strongest feature is a strong, but misleading title. The rest is pure fraud.

In our little project we are going with mainstream taste, and we are going with Dan Brown. The title of our work will be The Monty Python Code. Any resemblance to The Da Vinci Code is, of course, purely coincidental.

To follow our writing project go to Let’s Write A Novel – The Monty Python Code.

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The Bleeding Hills

A Novel by Wilfried F. Voss

I have fought a good fight,
I have finished my course,
I have kept the faith.
- 2 Timothy iv. 7

The Irish War is officially a part of history, but not for Finnean Whelan, an IRA veteran of almost 40 years. British Intelligence has produced evidence that he is the mastermind behind a conspiracy to assassinate the First Minister of Northern Ireland. For Whelan this is not only a mission of revenge, but marks the beginning of a journey into the past and the return to the one true love: Ireland. [More...]

The Bleeding Hills is available at Amazon.Com, Amazon.co.uk, Barnes & Nobel, and any other good bookstore.