Read the original posting at The Penultimate Page or the NaNo Support ning.  Thanks, Emilee!

You sit down at your computer, pull up WikiPedia to fact-check your Norse mythology…

And three hours later, you’re totally enthralled reading about the varieties of Japanese Kit-Kat bars.

As a writer, this is a totally normal progression of thought.  Writers are naturally interested in… well, everything.  No matter what genre you write, to flesh out a story is to create the world in which your characters live – often from the ground up: Do they live in a city or a town?  Is it a real place?  What’s the weather like, and how does that affect what your characters wear and do and drive (or not)?

Whether writing high fantasy or realistic contemporary chick lit, research is an essential part of the storycrafting process.

Say that you want to write an urban fantasy that sets a mortal girl from 1966 Chicago against a backdrop of Greek gods and teenage titans who take over the Art Institute.

Only… you were born in 1990, live in a suburban area of Kansas City, and you know nothing about Greek mythology beyond what you saw in Disney’s Hercules when you were eight.  And it was so scary that you cried and had to leave the room halfway through the film.

What do you need to research first?  And more importantly, how do you research it?

My personal opinion is the setting.  The first, and most salient, question to ask when researching a new setting is to explore your own motivations: Why do you want to set your story in that place – and at that time?

Before I make my next overarching statement, I need to own up: I was a History major in college.  I find research to be unbelievably fun, especially when it’s focused on cultural aspects that inform and shape the lives of characters (or, er, people).  So my next overarching statement about the research process of fiction is: Time is a place.

So for our sample plot bunny, you would need to research both “1966” and “Chicago” in the same way.  People, and characters, are products of both nurture and nature, and the “wheres” and “whens” of their existence dramatically shape the “whos” and “whys.”

In other words, changing someone’s clothing doesn’t make them live in any certain time period any more than simply saying that they live in Chicago means that they’re Chicagoan.  Think about your own life, and all of the things your “wheres” and “whens” affect: not just your clothing, but the foods you eat and the stores in which you shop, the kind of car your parents drive and the type of house you live in.  What was the first political event you remember?  Who was the first person you knew to say a “bad word” and what did they say?  What did you do when you came home from school, and what was your first job – or what do you think it will be?

What are your neighbors like?

How did you learn about sex?

Do you have to wear a school uniform?

How has your taste in music changed over the years?

As instinctive as the answers to these questions are in your own life, your character is not you.  At least, I hope not.  And at least not more than 15% you, as most characters are in some way inextricably tied to their creators.  All the same, you need to be able to answer these questions as quickly, certainly, and accurately for your characters as you did for yourself.

A good jumping point to discern just what aspects of your characters’ “whens” and “wheres” will be most important is the 100 Questions About Your Character survey (originally developed by tabletop gamers, but co-opted by writers everywhere).  You can find a clean copy at http://storywrite.com/contest/6584.

So now you know what you need to know.  But how to go about acquiring that knowledge?

Well, in my humble opinion – and on pain of death to anyone reading this who shares this tidbit with any of my old History professors – WikiPedia is a great place to start for basic outlines of information.  The key is to explore the depths of the “References” and “External Links.”  It’s like an ultra-concentrated Google search that doesn’t torture you with Boolean specifics – you can already reasonably guess that if the References on a page about Neighborhoods of Chicago says that it’s leading you to Wicker Park, it really is.  Score one for Web 2.0!

Of course, the flip side to WikiPedia’s greatness (besides those temptations to play The WikiPedia Game or clicking links until you end up looking at Japanese confectionery) is its overreaching broadness.  Great, so you’ve found a page on Neighborhoods of Chicago and it has eighty-six bajillion References.  How the heck do you know where to go and how to find just what you need to enhance your story?

My knee-jerk reaction is to advise that you read everything you can get your grubby little paws (sorry; werewolves on the brain!) on in regards to the world where your characters live.  Even the smallest details — the coloring of a candy wrapper, whether a street runs North-South or East-West — can prove to be integral to the integrity of your work.  Maybe your MC needs to chase Artemis down Wacker Drive.  Without research, a tense scene of hide-and-seek in the construction of its extension to the Lake Shore could never come to fruition, and a part of your plot arc would be lost.  You just never know!

However, I realize that most people have neither time nor gumption to read the encyclopedia.  I blame my own habit on the year I was in sixth grade, when I was so bored with classes that I decided to memorize the Almanac pages that came in our Assignment Notebooks.  However, the deeper you can get into the world of your characters, the more places they can lead you in developing their story, rather than you having to try to force along a plotline that is as thin as dental floss.  If you really understand your characters and their environment, then their linear arc can split off into a great golden web like Priori Incantatem, and your work can feel round and complete.  It’s the difference between a book you love and a book that changes the way you approach reading, writing, and seeing.

So take notes!  Whether you take notes manually – a great way to imprint the information you’re reading digitally, so you can rely more on your mind and less on said notes – or by bookmarking relevant pages, make sure that your hard work isn’t flowing in one ear and out the other.  Make columns for “Who,” “What,” “When,” “Where,” “Why,” and “How,” or categorize with a timetable of your characters’ day (Wake, Dress, Eat, School?, Work?, Eat, Free Time?, Sleep) to make sure you cover all of your bases.

The same rule goes for researching your supernatural creatures.  It isn’t enough to know the bare bones of their legends, or the image of what you’re trying to create.  The most successful stories know exactly why their mythologies function the way they do (even if it’s just convincing technobabble!).  If you don’t know the parameters of your magical beings, they’ll stretch and stretch until suddenly things sparkle that probably shouldn’t.   To break the rules, you need to know which directions they already bend.

So what does any of that have to do with Kit-Kat bars?

I have no idea.

But that’s the fun of worldbuilding.  Every world needs candy.

Some of my favorite research links:

http://www.foodtimeline.org/

http://www.flickr.com/groups/theretrokid/pool/

http://miss-vintage.com/

http://solomon.bltc.alexanderstreet.com/

http://asp6new.alexanderstreet.com/was2/was2.index.map.aspx

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/

http://www.wikipedia.org

http://www.oxfordlanguagedictionaries.com/

http://online.sagepub.com/

http://www.tvparty.com/

http://www.retrojunk.com/

http://www.inthe80s.com/

http://www.inthe70s.com/

http://www.nytimes.com/

http://www.factmonster.com/spot/fashiontime1.html

http://www.ventrella.com/Ideas/grammar.html