Today I am supposed to talk about the most interesting research I’ve ever done for a story.<\/p>\n
One of my favorite things to do in life is to learn. I’d be a student forever if I never had to take tests (or pay tuition). I love to read to absorb knowledge<\/span>\u00a0and learn. This tendency has become more acute the older I get. I now read as many non-fiction books as I do fiction. The ratio went from never reading anything just for the sake of information, to maybe one or two a year, to maybe one a month, and now, I’m always reading one fiction book and one non-fiction book. Every other book I read is for information.<\/span><\/p>\n Sometimes the facts I read about spring into story ideas. Sometimes it’s the other way around. Sometimes I end up using a writing project as an excuse to research something interesting.<\/p>\n It’s a “chicken or the egg” type situation. It works both ways.<\/p>\n I’ve studied tourism in Indonesia, ghost stories in India, strip malls and politics in California, the history and geography of the town I live in. I learned the theory of how to pick a lock, how to say things in Latin, and how much information the human brain can store. I’ve studied the affect of too much adrenaline in a body, Greek and Roman mythology, the nine circles of Hell from bottom to top, and just about every medieval weapon imaginable.<\/p>\n And that is probably my favorite research I’ve done. In my first attempt at writing a novel, I wrote several intricate weapons-training scenes. So I researched how to shoot a bow and crossbow, how to properly throw knives (even bought some for practice), how to fight with sai as well as staves, and how techniques differ for\u00a0sword-fighting\u00a0with a fencing foil verses a cutlass. I even researched how to throw an appropriate punch (although I still haven’t mastered that one). I certainly don’t know how to do any actual fighting, weapons or unarmed, but it made me feel pretty empowered knowing, in theory, how to kick ass.<\/p>\n In theory, I could learn to do anything.<\/p>\n Research is a huge part of being a writer. We can’t tell convincing stories about anything without learning about whatever subject we need to write in-detail about. As I writer, I never need an excuse to do research. I will always be a learner, and while I may never become a master at any of the subjects I research, it’s enough to make me a convincing writer.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Today I am supposed to talk about the most interesting research I’ve ever done for a story. One of my favorite things to do in life is to learn. I’d be a student forever if I never had to take tests (or pay tuition). I love to read to absorb knowledge\u00a0and learn. This tendency has […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[276,756,928],"class_list":["post-8020","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-process","tag-details","tag-non-fiction","tag-research"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8020","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8020"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8020\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8020"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8020"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8020"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}