Our Research Notes series invites authors to describe their process for a recent book, with “research” defined as broadly as they would like. This week, Donna Miscolta writes about Ofelia and Norma from Regal House. + I was a science major in college. I won’t explain why. Suffice it to say it was a case…

Much like Colin McAllister, the narrator of my new novel The Shitbird, I arrived in New Bedford, Massachusetts on a raw gray day in October of 1993 to begin my first assignment as a lowly seaman apprentice in the U.S. Coast Guard, at the very bottom of the pecking order aboard a 270-foot cutter.

I discovered Berkeley Springs because I had it in my mind to visit some hot springs within a few hours drive of Washington, D.C.

In all the years I’ve lived as a writer — which is to say, all the years of my adult life — that moment of facing a blank screen or a blank piece of paper and typing the number “1” never got any easier.

An Essay wherein an Author of a Chapbook of Very Smol Stories muses on the 12 micros and flash fictions in the Collection to see if any “Research” took place.

My first novel started with a practically unknown historical person. To bring her to life, I researched the few available references, envisioned her in a scene from my developing plot, and watched her personality emerge.

I set the stories in Toledo because that was where I started my legal career. With Toledo as the backdrop, I could summon the emotions and anxieties of a young associate.

This is how you throw a cup. It starts with a ball of clay of uniform texture, stuck firmly onto the center of a pottery wheel.

My forthcoming novel, The Last Supper follows three chaotic months in the life of Amanda—a mother of two young children who has just turned forty—who is desperately trying to reclaim her economic and creative agency. 

Research has always enriched my creative activities as a writer, much more than just as a way of finding useful information for my books. I do research in order to write. I use the reading I do for my books to provoke composition.

I always wonder how other writers let go of their characters, because I can’t. 

Writing requires invention. Choosing which words, which scenes that will make the beginnings, the middles, and the ends is an inherently creative act. And yet we all know that writers cannot possibly invent the world.