Wednesday, August 1, 2012

Research What You Can't Experience

The more thorough your research on any subject is, the better you will be able to write about it. Certainly, if you are writing nonfiction, you have to know all about your subject material. But imagine you have a fictional character who happens to have a learning disability. Can you portray that character accurately?

If you wanted to learn what it was like to eat apples cooked in various fashions across the world, it's not too hard to go and find some recipes and try them out. Experience is the best way to understand so many things. But if you don't have a learning disability, you simply can't experience that. That's when you need to do research.

Read about these things, interview people first-hand. Get as much raw information as possible, and find out how to get people to talk about the things you really need to understand.  The more of it all that you have, the better you will be able to write about that subject.

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