When writing there is times you can make shit up (What’s her hair color? How about eye color?), and there are times where you need to research facts so your reader doesn’t throttle you when you meet them. Today, we’ll focus on the two types of research, broad and targeted.

Broad research is, as its name implies, looking at a subject, event, or time period from a 10,000 ft view. You don’t care about what color Ulysses S. Grant’s horse was or if he rode into battle bear back. You are only interested in the fact he existed and that he leaded a massive volunteer army into multiple battles. This can also be the hardest research because you don’t always know how deep you should go. I recommend setting a time limit and sticking by it. In my case, I decided an hour was enough time to refresh my memory on the basics of where General Grant was and who his competition consisted of.

Next type is targeted research, this allows you take the deeper look at your material and gather interesting facts that you may want to integrate into your story. Like General Grant was also the eighteenth president of the United States or that his major rival on the battle field was Robert E. Lee. These points that will have to be addressed within your story and therefor you better get right. You wouldn’t want to be called a moron if you stated Grant captured Richmond, Virginia, in 1863, and it took him two more years before he gained control of Vicksburg, Mississippi.

However, during this phase you’ll tend to find that you could lose yourself in the research (or one would hope), and like with broad research I recommend that you set limits on how much time you spend.

I know most of you will want to blend the two of these together, and I’m not suggesting it’s a bad idea. Just I will warn you it may become a massive time sink with no real value. When you start writing you have a basic idea that will drive a high level discovery of your plot line. Deciding if the story is fiction or nonfiction is part of this idea, and this will define how far you can stray from the truth. In my case, I’ve decided to write an alternative history piece in which General Robert E. Lee has armed slaves to battle The North by promising the Negroes that they will gain new freedoms if they serve. With this in mind, I need to do broad research to decide what battles I may want to rewrite and what personal facts about Grant and Lee I may wish to change for the sake of my story.

After gathering that information, I could lay out a known time line of what really happen and start playing “what if” games by moving battles around, removing some, and adding new ones. After that basic alternative time line is complete then additional targeted research on what really happen during and after those battles are needed. You may also want to find out happened to soldiers, slaves, and civilians when cities were taken.

However, had you done all your research in one sitting you may find yourself with information overload as you try to force every “gold nugget” into your story. Instead by pacing and limiting your research you can give the story a chance to grow and show you where you need to study more.

The main thing is to keep writing and not get sidetracked.

BTW, I have no interest in the Civil War, and the novel for National Novel Writing Month I’m working on isn’t even set on Earth. I’ll write more about what I plan on doing for November next week when I have a clearer picture of the world my story is placed in.