When writing anything or creating something that you are going to present to the world, you need to do research. Maybe you know someone that did something that went viral or was a success and did not do research; you are looking probably at a one time pony or something that doesn’t get a follow-through. The research will help you out immensely in anything and everything. It is the single most important thing when creating.
Usually, the research part does not get noticed or is not so much a talked about thing. Sometimes it can be boring. It can be grueling. You feel like you are not creating, being active, when in fact you are preparing for what is to come. Usually, when you are learning something, the research part is omitted. Let’s say you are taking martial arts these days. When learning the moves you are actually being thought of something that took years and years of extensive research to be presented as what it is now. Scientist when looking for cures spends tireless hours researching for possibilities on how to deal with viruses and others.
For the story Extra Terrestres we went to chicken farms, we interviewed farmers, took old newspaper clippings for anything and everything concerning how was the treatment of chicken on these places and any ties with the government. How the bureaucracy worked. Was the movie about chickens? Government? No! The part was shown, but we had to know everything about the poultry industry in order to understand what we were actually writing about. What if in the audience was somebody that knows about how this industry works? We would have been called out if we wrote something completely absurd about what real life is.
What I want you to take from this is that you need to go deeper on the rabbit hole and take all the information you can about any and every subject to your writing and become some sort of expert. People will find out when you don’t know what you are talking about. One thing you don’t want is for somebody to drop your book and not recommend you just because you were lazy and didn’t do your work. Even if you are inventing something brand new you have to know how it works and usually, you do that by comparing or getting inspired by something that already exists.
So what can you do when you want to know about, fighting, detectives, Vikings, parallel dimensions, or other subjects? Google it? Wikipedia? Library? Ask the people that work on the specific job you are writing about. Don’t stop on getting a definition, go deeper! Is your story about cops? What do they do? Departments? Salary? People’s views on them were you live and in other places? What happens if they fail to do their job? Is there a penalty? Do they get fired? From one single thing, you’ll need to fill so much data in order to be a subject matter expert. All that information will actually help you when the famous writer’s block comes around, you will have so much ammo in order to beat it.
Usually, writer’s block is due to a lack of research. So if you want to make your writing easier from the already hard word it is… I suggest you prepare yourself and research the heck of all the components from your story.