Hello

Following on from my last post, which was two weeks ago, my fault, sorry, I have looked into buying a notice board. This may seem like a simple task but I don’t want to be buying notice boards all the time. This is necessary I can assure you. (I’m sure some of you are aware of this anyway.)

I also decided to dedicate a majority of last week to research. I have started to research certain parts of two of my stories, the story I’m currently writing which is my take on the vampire myth, The End Solution, and The Searcher’s Want, my hunter/searcher against demons for the fate of the world story I started, and finished recently, for NaNoWriMo.

For The End Solution, I’ve started by looking into the structure of the British Government. Specifically, who the Prime Minister has around him and why. I since discovered that he has around 21 members of parliament who act as cabinet ministers around him mainly amongst others. This has given me the headache of having to come up with possibly 10 new fully formed characters for this story as I don’t plan to need all of them in a complete capacity. And, along with having to write full character profiles for the ones already in the story, this is both bad and good. Bad, all that time it will take. Good, because I know I’ll enjoy it on many levels and it will help to advance the story greatly. Research…Will I ever like you?

For The Searcher’s Want, I decided to start the character profiles. Using the template I found in a post from writerdsnelson entitled ‘Profiling Blake’, I’ve discovered a lot about my characters and some things I can use to enhance their back stories, and create some conflict which I think the story needs, when I come to re-draft the story in the future. What I found out when doing this was some research, which I’d been neglecting about some of my characters, was sorely needed. For instance, one of my characters, the second oldest searcher named Abraham Smith, has been a searcher for 200 years. He became immortal at the age of 55 after being a searcher for 2 years. Now, this brings up all kinds of things when I’m writing about his history. Working out dates and things. It’s as exciting as it is frustrating. I think I’ve got the dates right, which I’m going to go over again just to be sure, to then find out I’ve missed one thing out. And I have to start all over again. Research…Will I ever like you?

I know I have to do research to make sure my story makes sense when it comes to location, dates and times of things, street names etc. But I think I’m just whining because it’s not as simple as I thought. I’m going to continue for the next week and I’m sure I’ll grow to like it. Here’s hoping anyway.

Well, to end this post and push me back into a research and character building frenzy, I’ll leave you with a question. How do you like to go about doing the research needed for any writing that you are about to do or are currently doing?

Cheers