A chance discovery that the historical Macbeths were not as depicted by Shakespeare sent me on a long quest to find and write their stories, culminating in the release of Upon the Corner of the Moon in March. That meant a great deal of research, as my background was in journalism rather than history. Good…

At least the title of my second novel, What Do You Want from Me? hasn’t changed since I started working on it more than eight years ago. Pretty much everything else has, though.

Our Research Notes series invites authors to describe their process for a recent book, with “research” defined as broadly as they like. This week, Beth Kephart writes about Tomorrow Will Bring Sunday’s News: A Philadelphia Story from Tursulowe Press. + Among My Souvenirs:On Researching Tomorrow Will Bring Sunday’s News The box arrived on Thanksgiving Day…

Resist the temptation to employ metafictional techniques to mock your partner’s propensity for sending the story back to you after having added nothing more than a few paragraphs examining the origin of a single word or phrase.

My research for my debut novel, Moral Treatment, began when I was a kid, exploring the park-like grounds of the Traverse City State Hospital. A sprawling, residential psychiatric facility on the west side of my hometown…

Our Research Notes series invites authors to describe their process for a recent book, with “research” defined as broadly as they like. This week, Brittney Corrigan writes about The Ghost Town Collectives, winner of the Osprey Award for Fiction from Middle Creek Publishing. + Everything in Its Place The research process is one of my…

Our Research Notes series invites authors to describe their process for a recent book, with “research” defined as broadly as they like. This week, Jonathan Taylor writes about A Physical Education: On Bullying, Discipline & Other Lessons from Goldsmiths Press. + “We’ll look back on this and laugh”: What I learned about memoir in writing…

Our Research Notes series invites authors to describe their process for a recent book, with “research” defined as broadly as they like. This week, Maggie Cooper writes about The Theme Park of Women’s Bodies from Bull City Press. + I am an inveterate googler. I try to control myself: I don’t google during theatrical performances,…

I wasn’t planning to write another penguin novel. In the spring before My Last Continent was published, I’d traveled to the Galápagos Islands to see penguins and other wildlife—it wasn’t meant to be a research trip. Yet it turned into one after I learned about the bizarre human history of Floreana Island.

There’s a common misconception that when you’re writing fiction with non-realistic elements (often called speculative fiction) that you can just make up whatever you want, in other words that you don’t have to do research. 

Spoiler alert: bodies are strange. I think I first realized this when I was nine and dropped a frozen turkey on my big toe. The skin turned purple, and I sobbed for a good hour, and I stopped picking up things I wasn’t supposed to for the rest of the year.

In 2017 I started writing an essay about growing up with Tourette Syndrome. The essay, I hoped, would be a springboard into a larger book…