Don’t Let Your Inner Critic Hijack Your Book Research

This is part of the Claim Your AUTHORity series.
You’re jamming away at your novel. You’re composing merrily when you realize you don’t know what the cars look like in Paris, 1937, the era you’re writing about.

You dip into Google, searching for images that will help you accurately describe those cars. Before you know it, you’ve spent 40 minutes leaping from link to link, gathering more support for what you’re writing.

Finding information for your book online, or re-surfing, is fun. You can claim, guilt-free, that you’re working on your book. But a glance at the clock shows it’s time to pick up the kids. You shutter your session and enter the slipstream of your busy day.

Your one-hour writing session involved exactly 20 minutes of writing and 40 minutes of re-surfing, yielding a couple scribbled pages and a lot of information, much of it not applicable to your book.
Sound familiar?

Three ways your inner critic can hijack your research

I know this scenario well; having written a historical novel, I have spent countless hours researching my era and time period. But early on I experienced these three pitfalls while researching for a book:

1. It is much easier to surf an endless research loop than to do the difficult work of writing. Your inner critic will love that you’re spending so much time looking at other people’s work.
2. Your inner critic is committed to making sure you don’t look like a fool. He can turn your commitment to accuracy into a practice of endless research that can prohibit you from ever getting your book done.
3. If you’re writing a non-fiction book based on your professional or personal expertise, your dedication to thoroughness can fuel deadly comparisons that wither your authorial confidence.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

Keep your re-surfing in check

Try these simple but effective practices that my clients and I use to keep research from becoming the purview of the critic.

1. Demarcate writing time and research time. If you have only 2 hours a week to work on your book, give 1.5 hours to writing and .5 to research.
2. While writing, keep a separate log of items that need to be researched. When an issue comes up – what kind of fabric were skirts made of in 1937? – jot that down on your research list. I kept a notebook for notes for my novel and always had a page going entitled ‘To research’.
3. Set aside a specific amount of time each week for this work. Be realistic; one or two hours is usually enough. Give yourself parameters. I usually did research at the end of the week in the afternoon, when my focus for writing waned.
4. If you’re writing a non-fiction book based on your expertise, consider drafting your material before looking to see what else has been done. Get a sense of how much you need to know about what’s ‘out there’ before you feel confident claiming your AUTHORity.
5. Keep a list of sources – web sites, magazines, people – whom you will turn to for research. Be open to the fun serendipity that will lead you beyond what you know and into territory that will enhance your book.
6. Notice when the impulse to research arises. Often it surfaces just as you sit down to write. But notice, too, how your focus and energy and perhaps even your confidence can diminish the more time you spend in research mode.

What helps you keep your critic from hijacking your research process?