Over in a Twilight discussion thread on Absolute Write, it’s been brought up a lot that Meyer readily admits she’s too lazy to research and just wings things as she goes along .  Of course, that has a tendency of creating tremendous plotholes in her writing, the most prominent (which isn’t saying much since a lot of the plotholes are prominent) being her own vampires.  This also steps on the toes of researching within your own work, not just without.  Yes, if you’re going to distort a creature, you need to have a basis of understanding about it before you can manipulate it.  But once you manipulate it, it still needs to remain consistent within your own body of work.  How Edward is supposed to be a walking piece of granite yet can still produce seminal fluid and venomous spit (while the women are completely sterile and can only hawk loogies of doom) is beyond me.  But it leads me to ask, how do you research?

Me, I’m lazy as anything.  I don’t like to research.  But as a self-respecting author, I’m not going to let a manuscript that’s reflective of me go out into the world with fallacies the size of the Grand Canyon because I just couldn’t be bothered.  No author that gives a damn about their work would.  My methods of researching, though, vary from story to story.

For Diamond Crier, that’s mostly internal research and making sure my world’s consistent.  Considering I don’t edit along my writing way, that’ll happen when I start the revision process.  I do need to do some geographical research and see if the land I have mapped out will actually work but mostly it’s research within my own little world.  Nothing prior to writing it.

Earth Shatterer, while that story idea was brewing for a while, I didn’t plan it out because I didn’t really know what I was going to have in it until I wrote it.  It’s set in an area of California I’m familiar with so I’m done with that part.  Then varying creatures of Fey decided to pop in while I was writing it.  Again, since I much prefer to punch out the story first and foremost, I’m not going to dive into fairy lore until I start my revisions.  I know very little about Fey simply because I was never that interested until now.  I know what I want my Fey to do but I need to make sure I’m doing the distortions properly.  On top of that I have internal research to do as well, what with the Other Side and all.

With Coney Island Psychic I started reading books on Coney Island prior to my starting writing it.  I’m still reading Coney books and I’ll probably be reading Coney books while I write it (once I start it up again) and when I’m editing it.  I’m trying to capture a particular feel and the history of Coney can play a huge role not only in that but the stories themselves so I need to know what’s going on.  Considering I’m only a few hours away by train, I ddi visit the area, took pictures and experienced Coney (and its surrounding neighborhoods) first hand.  That helped immensely.  I think this work is unique in that I’ve been pretty constantly researching for the story.  I haven’t done that with any of the others.

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