A Quote by Zachary Lazar
I try to do as little as possible without looking like an idiot. Research is fun and easy. Writing is hard. So I try not to let the research become an excuse to not do the writing part.
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When it comes to sermon writing, generally there are two problems. Some preachers love the research stage but hate the writing, and they start writing too late. Others don't like doing research, so they move way too fast to the writing part.
Time spent researching varies from book to book. Some novels require months, even years of research, others very little. I try to do most of my research before I begin but inevitably questions emerge during the writing.
One book at a time... though I'm usually doing the research for others while I'm writing, but that sort of research is fairly desultory and I like to stick to the book being written - and writing a book concentrates the mind so the research is more productive.
The research. It is always the best part of writing. And, of course, it is the great excuse to travel.
I enjoy research as much as writing so I try to make my stories as fact-based as possible, which I think helps them seem more authentic.
Writing wasn't easy to start. After I finally did it, I realized it was the most direct contact possible with the part of myself I thought I had lost, and which I constantly find new things from. Writing also includes the possibility of living many lives as well as living in any time or world possible. I can satisfy my enthusiasm for research, but jump like a calf outside the strict boundaries of science. I can speak about things that are important to me and somebody listens. It's wonderful!
Research and writing are lonely occupations. It is easy to become discouraged in solitary confinement.
What's so fun when you shoot in a car is you get to research all the other road movies that have ever been done, and you try to figure out where do they place the cameras and how many shots can you get with your people in the car. So just doing the research on the films is so fun.
I don't like writing as an expert. I like writing as an amateur. I like writing as an idiot. It's much more fun to start in ignorance.
I do like the research part of writing, I must admit.
All my books take a long time to research. I spend several months researching before I start writing, and in the middle of writing I often have to stop and look up stuff. At my local library, I am one of the best customers! The research takes several months.
All research scientists know that writing in the passive voice is artificial; they are not disembodied observers, but people doing research.
Through the misguided notion that writing about flying was easy, I had McCone become a pilot. When I learned that research in books wasn't enough, I forced myself to take lessons.
There's a certain amount of pressure that goes with writing superhero characters, especially characters that are beloved to audiences. You know that you're always writing into a certain amount of expectations and into an existing fandom, and I try to take the pressure of that in when I first accept a project and then I try to push it aside as much as possible and just focus on the story that I want to tell. It's definitely a little more pressure than writing something of your own, from your own brain, and creating those expectations from scratch. But I also like the challenge of it.
Writing fiction is very different to writing non-fiction. I love writing novels, but on history books, like my biographies of Stalin or Catherine the Great or Jerusalem, I spend endless hours doing vast amounts of research. But it ends up being based on the same principle as all writing about people: and that is curiosity!
Anybody can do research. The plotting of the novel, writing the ending before you write anything else, which I always do - I don't know that everybody can do that. That's the hard part.
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