by Dave Haslett
If you buy books for research, you can sell them on Amazon and eBay when you’ve finished with them.
Skimming
Skimming a book enables you to find the information you need really quickly. Start by looking at the table of contents. It immediately tells you which aspects of the subject the book covers, and you can jump straight to the topics you need to research. Read the entire table of contents, even if you’re only interested in one or two topics, as you’ll get a complete overview of the book’s coverage of the subject in just a few seconds.
Next, flip through the book looking at the section headings, subheadings and index. If it has summaries at the end of each chapter, read those too.
The only sections you might need to read properly are those that deal directly with the topics you’re researching. But by this point you may have picked up enough information about them already.
You can easily get through thirty or forty books in an hour using this technique. But you’ll probably only need to skim through four or five, and you can do that in just a few minutes.
To help you choose the right books, go back to the list of words and topics you made during the brainstorming and Mind Mapping sessions. Look up a few of those words in each book’s index and see how many of them are listed. If there are several matches, the book is worth studying further. If not, put it back on the shelf and try another.
Remember that you can do this online too. Amazon’s Look Inside feature lets you to see the first ten percent of most books – including the table of contents if you scroll up. You can then decide if the book is worth buying (and selling again once you’ve finished with it).
Speed-reading
You can speed things up even further by learning to speed-read. You’ll learn to see words as a group or phrase rather than as individual words. We go through a similar process when we learn to read: we stop seeing words as being made up of separate letters and only see the words themselves. Speed-reading takes this to the next level. It takes a tremendous amount of practice to begin with, but it eventually becomes automatic, just like normal reading.
The average adult reading speed is between 200 and 250 words per minute. Speed-reading can increase this to around 1,000 words per minute.
Here are some simple tips to speed up your reading:
Use your finger as a guide and point at the words. Or use a ruler or straight edge so your eyes follow each line of text easily and don’t lose their place.
Run your finger or some other reading guide across and down the page faster than you normally read, and make sure your eyes follow it.
Don’t backtrack. You’ll still take in the general meaning even if you skip a few words.
Don’t sound the words in your head as you read them. This slows your reading speed down to your speaking speed, and you can read a lot faster than that. This takes practice – and willpower – but it’s worth persevering with it.
If you’re interested in learning more about speed-reading, try The Speed Reading Book by Tony Buzan. It shows you how to read much faster and increase your comprehension too. I highly recommend it.
If you’re happy to read on a screen, there are several websites and apps that can flash text at you at high speed, several words at a time. You can import or paste in your own text, and select the number of words it shows at a time and the rate at which they appear. Spreeder and ReadMe! are good examples. They can increase your reading speed to 800 words per minute or higher.
Television
There are TV channels and documentaries covering just about every subject you can think of. There are hundreds of terrestrial, satellite and cable TV channels, and more available online, as well as thousands of archived shows that haven’t been broadcast for years. Search online for the subject you’re researching plus the words “television”, “show”, “channel”, “DVD” or “video” to see what comes up.
The Know-it-all Friend
I’m sure you know someone who’s a bit of a know-it-all and has an opinion on everything. Ask him what he knows about the subject you’re researching. If he doesn’t know much about it, ask him where he would start. What would he want to know? Where would he go to find out? Who would he ask? Does he know any experts? Does he know anyone who might have some experience in it?
I’m sure he’ll be delighted to help, especially if you tell him you’re writing a book. And it might make up for all those times when he drove you round the bend.
Travel
Friends who travel
When your friends come back from their holidays, have a quick look through their photos, guidebooks, maps, souvenirs, and so on, and ask them about their impressions of the places they visited.
If they’re about to visit somewhere you’d like to write about, ask them to take photos and bring back guidebooks and other souvenirs for you. If you ask nicely, they might even visit a particular place for you, even if it’s not on their itinerary. As well as photographing it, you could ask them to carry out other research, such as finding out what it’s made of, how big it is, what’s around it, what it smells like, who to contact for more information, and so on.
Language
Most readers get irritated if you fill your book with foreign words and phrases.
If you’re writing a non-fiction book and you use a foreign word, explain what it means immediately. You only need a handful of foreign words to prove you know your stuff.
In the case of fiction, don’t mangle a character’s words to indicate that English isn’t his first language. Simply avoid contractions to make his speech more formal, and slip in the odd foreign word now and again where he doesn’t know the English equivalent.
When you describe a foreign country in your novel, you only need to use three foreign words to show you know what you’re talking about. Again, it helps if these are words where there’s no English equivalent. You don’t need to immerse yourself in the culture or spend months learning the language if you only need three words; you can do it in a couple of minutes using a guidebook or phrase book. But make sure you really understand what those three words mean!
Travel agents
Some of their staff may have visited the places you’re interested in, so it’s worth asking them about it. Even if they haven’t been there themselves, they may know someone who has – perhaps a friend or colleague who works in another branch. They’ll also have a good selection of brochures, travel guides, maps, and information for travellers visiting particular countries.
Videos and DVDs
Larger public libraries usually have a good selection of documentaries and travelogues about foreign countries, cultures and people. Online retailers such as Amazon and eBay will have a wider selection. And most satellite and cable TV services have dedicated travel and documentary channels which show them.
Visiting places
Sometimes, the best and easiest way to carry out research is to actually visit the place and soak up the atmosphere for yourself. You’ll be able to write about it with much more conviction if you’ve been there.
If you can’t get out much, or you can’t afford to travel, write about the places you can get to. They might be local to you, but they won’t be to most of your readers. If the places seem mundane to you, try looking at them through a tourist’s eyes. Or visit the area with a group of tourists and listen to them as they discuss it. Speak to them if you can, and use some of their actual words and phrases when you write about the place.
Other sources of information:
Tourist Information Offices.
Foreign embassies in this country.
British or U.S. embassies in other countries.
Local and national newspapers and their websites.
Universities and colleges
Many universities teach specialist subjects, or research them, or hold national archives on them. These are the places where you’re most likely to find experts in the subject. Some of them might even be Nobel Prizewinners. It should only t
ake a few minutes of online searching to find out which universities specialise in the subject you’re interested in, and the names of the experts who teach and work there.
You could also try contacting your local college to see if any of the lecturers can point you in the right direction.
University and colleges libraries are sometimes open to the public, though you might have to pay a fee if you aren’t a student. They usually have hundreds of specialist and technical books that aren’t available from public libraries, as well as thousands of research papers and other archives.
Your bookshelf
There are a few books that I regard as essential to every writer. Here in the UK, I rely quite heavily on The Oxford Manual of Style, The Times Style Guide and a pocket guide to grammar and punctuation. If you write for the U.S. market, you’ll probably want The Elements of Style by Strunk and White or The Chicago Manual of Style.
You might need a good dictionary and thesaurus. I use the free online sites dictionary.com and Power Thesaurus. Encyclopaedia Britannica’s online edition is also valuable, as is Wikipedia.
Depending on your level of experience and the sort of writing you do, you might need some writing guides. I particularly like The Creative Writing Coursebook by Julia Bell and Paul Magrs. How to Write a Million and More About How to Write a Million are good value too, each combining three classic fiction-writing guides in a single volume.
And, of course, you’ll probably need some reference books about the subjects you write about.
Your job
If you have a job, you might feel that it gets in the way of your writing. But it doesn’t have to be like that. We’ve already looked at using your job as a source of ideas. If you write books about the people, places and situations you already know, and those you encounter through your work, you might not need to do any research at all.
Look at the people you work with, those you travel or commute with, and those who come to visit. Listen to the people you speak to on the phone during the course of your workday. If you come across anyone particularly interesting, change his name and job and put him in your book as a ready-made character.
You can do a surprising amount of research in company time without it affecting your work. And that means you’ll have more free time for writing.
If you write about the industry you work in – even if you write fiction – you probably have several experts on your contact list. They might even work in the same building or the same room as you. They’ll be happy to tell you more about what they do and answer your questions. You don’t need to tell them you’re researching a book, of course. And they shouldn’t get suspicious if you ask them questions about the industry you already work in. It might even benefit your career.
If your job involves travelling, use the time when you’re off-duty to explore the places you visit and study the people you meet. It’s more worthwhile than shutting yourself in your hotel room or sitting in a bar. (Unless you’re using that time to write, of course.)
Other sources of information
There are thousands of other sources of research material, and it would be impossible to list them all. I hope this chapter has given you enough information to get you started on your research. If you’d like to know more, I can recommend Ann Hoffmann’s book Research for Writers.
Use it while it’s fresh
It’s important to write down your research notes as soon as possible so you don’t forget them. It’s also important to add notes about where you found each item, who you contacted, and so on. If you can see where each item will fit in your book, write that down too. Label your photos too, so you know where and when they were taken, who’s in them, and so on.
The next step
In the next chapter, we’ll look at the fastest ways to organise your book, refine its structure, and prepare a detailed outline to work from.
7. Planning and outlining
In this chapter, we’ll refine our basic structure from Chapter 5 into a complete outline.
In traditional book-writing systems, the most creative part comes later, when you actually write the book. But in this system, the most creative part comes right now.
The fastest way to write your book is to create a detailed outline and write your book from that. As long as you stick to the outline rigidly, the writing stage involves nothing more than expanding what’s in the outline and filling in the details. It’s less creative than traditional writing, but also much faster – most of the creativity goes into creating the outline.
Your outline needs to be as perfect as you can get it before you move on to the writing stage. You shouldn’t make any significant changes once writing is under way. This will reduce the need to rewrite or cut anything, saving a whole heap of time and effort.
Let’s start with fiction. Think of a film or TV show where the camera cuts from one shot to another several times within a scene. Each of those shots should be listed in your outline, together with a brief description of what’s happening – just a sentence or two – and a note about what the characters are saying. You don’t need to write their actual words at this point; save that for the writing stage.
If you create your whole outline like this, writing your book will be easy. You’ll know exactly where the story is going, you’ll know it works as a story, and you’ll know when it’s finished.
Each shot in your outline should expand to fill one or two paragraphs of finished text.
For non-fiction, you should break things down in a similar way. Start with a list of all the chapters. Then list all the topics or headings within each chapter. Then, under each heading, list the points you’ll be making. Single-sentence bullet points work well for this. If it’s a large topic, break it down further by adding sub-headings with further sets of bullet points beneath them. When you have a complete set of bullet points for every topic in every chapter, your outline is finished.
As we noted earlier, if you created a Mind Map for your book, you’ll have done most of this work already. If you created your Mind Map electronically, export it as an outline, then open the outline in your word processor to tidy it up.
Each bullet point in your outline should expand to fill one or two paragraphs of finished text.
More detail now = easier writing later
If you work from a complete and detailed outline, you’ll never have to worry about what to write next. You can’t get stuck and you can’t get writer’s block. Your only job is to expand what’s in the outline and fill in the details.
Another huge benefit is that you can jump about all over the place. You don’t have to start at the beginning and keep going until you reach the end. You could write all of your favourite parts first. As you’ll always know what you’re going to say in each section, all you have to do is write it as quickly as you can, expanding and filling in the details as you go. If you find a particular section too difficult, skip to another section and come back to the troublesome one later.
If a section is too difficult to write, the problem almost certainly lies with the outline. Try breaking that section down into smaller steps.
You don’t have to actually write or type the text. Later in the book, we’ll look at some alternative ways of getting your words onto the page or screen.
With your detailed outline to hand, writing your book goes something like this:
Choose which section you want to work on. You can pick one from anywhere in your outline.
Read the outline for that section, and then spend five minutes thinking about what you’re going to write.
Write that section. If you broke your outline down sufficiently, you should be able to do this in a paragraph or two, and it should take no more than fifteen to twenty minutes.
If it takes much longer than twenty minutes, the section was probably too large. Splitting it into smaller sections or adding sub-headings beneath it will make things easier.
Mark off that section in your outline so you know it’s done, th
en choose which one to work on next.
Repeat until you’ve marked off every section in your outline and your first draft is finished.
Introducing mini-sessions
By now, you may have spotted the biggest advantage of writing your book in small sections like this: there’s no need for long writing sessions. All you need is five minutes to think about what you’re going to say, and fifteen to twenty minutes to write it. You don’t need to set aside several hours each day, or cancel your social life. A few minutes here and there will get the job done.
You might not have considered writing your book in your lunch break, because it isn’t long enough. If you write books the traditional way, that’s probably true. But it might be long enough to expand two or three sections of your outline. At that rate, you could write a full-length book in three months, even if you only work during your lunch break. Or, to put it another way, you could write four full-length books a year just during your lunch break.