One of the most common complaints about writing, most of it fan writing but also some published, produced, and performed material, is that people don't do the damned research. On the face of it it's an easy enough fix, as long as you know what you're writing about and what you don't know. And therein lies the problem.

Research is a dangerous, double-edged weapon for those of us Elephant's children and our insatiable curiosities. It's very easy to get sucked into wikisurfing, leafing through interesting books, checking out more books as a result of either activity, and before you know it a couple of months have passed and there's a wild deadline breathing down your neck. And there's a number of ways to deal with this.

The first and easiest way I've found is simply to know what you're writing about. Have an outline. Better yet, have a detailed outline so that if you run off on a tangent about dyeing with wildflowers of Western Europe you know it's a tangent irrelevant to your work. And you can at least try to tell yourself, firmly, stoppit. That's one of the biggest reasons why most of the writing exercises and questionnaires on this site are geared towards working with an outline. For me, at least, it keeps the digressions to a minimum. Having an outline also gives you a place to start when you're working in a field you know little to nothing about. For example, if you've decided you really want to write a science fiction piece about a virologist but you squeaked through secondary school biology class? Having an outline gives you the relief of knowing that you only need some very broad, basic terms that mean what you want them to mean, and you don't have to know about nucleotides or amino acid bonding or what do enzymes do.

Outlines don't work for everyone, though. And when that happens, you've got a few options at least. The first and potentially the easiest one is to set a timer. Conduct your research for a set period of time and then walk away and work on something else, like the actual writing part or the editing or even folding your laundry. Or you can do one big planning and researching spree at the start of the work, open all the tabs ever (if you're like me and you leave your computer on and your tabs open for days) and then every day at a set time, go through and close tabs. Take notes on what you learn, maybe you'll want to bookmark some sites and some tabs can more than likely be closed out because it's just repeating the same information you initially learned anyway.

Study buddies can be helpful, too. Especially study buddies who won't let you go off researching the migratory patterns of swallows, be they African or European. Even if it's just someone who will check in with you once a day to make sure you wrote your X number of pages or Y number of words, in addition to doing all that research. Having someone there to read over your notes can also mean getting asked the hard questions, such as, do you really need all that information in there? All writers should have at least a couple people on whom they can rely to provide input and a voice outside the writer's own head, because the inside of a writer's own head gets awful echo-y with all those worlds rattling around in there.

So, there's some ways not to get sucked into research. The other thing about research, however, is that it's very very easy to do it wrong.

And, okay, the internet is full of people who will tell you you're doing it wrong, and full of people who will offend you by being Wrong On The Internet. But by doing your research wrong, here, I mean being lazy about it, not acknowledging what you don't know, and fudging details for the sake of less work rather than for the sake of drama. Two things will constantly trip you up no matter how much research you do: 1) Time moves on, and so does scientific knowledge, accepted practices, traditions, and so on. 2) Sometimes what you find to be true and what needs to happen for the sake of the story are not the same thing. And knowing when to break the laws of physics, the procedures of law enforcement, or what have you, is a whole other essay.

I'm about to say something I cringe from saying, because it makes your job ten times harder, but: Wikipedia is not the be-all and end-all of research. It also makes me cringe because, yes, many's the time I've gone to Wikipedia to look up some term real quick and make sure I remember it right. And to an extent, that's fine. Wikipedia is very good for quick summaries and even better for finding key words to look for later, if you don't have a grasp of the jargon for the field you're digging in. But it is vital to keep in mind that Wikipedia is only as good as its contributors. There will be information that is misleading, incomplete, or outright wrong. If you're going to use Wikipedia as the backbone of your research, be sure you put some meat on it with other sources. (Which is another thing to keep in mind: "accredited" only means "generally accepted as being truthful and honorable", it doesn't necessarily mean "right.")

Wikipedia does do one thing very well, which is cite. Specifically, it puts its citations along the bottom for you to follow up on. So follow up. Read the journals, look at the names of the people who wrote the source material for the Wick, look at other stuff they've done in the same field. Use the material in Wiki as a jumping off point to go find other sources for your information and see if it corroborates or conflicts with what Wiki says.

And remember: libraries still exist! With so much information online it's easy to forget that ancient yet still relevant resource. Libraries are your friends, folks! Librarians rule the world. A good librarian will tell you the search terms you should be looking under (or at least he can make a good guess) and what section of the library it's in. An amazing one might be able to spend five minutes on the web (if you ask her nicely) and come up with two or three websites and five or six journals or magazines for you to look at. Libraries, and librarians, are awesome.

The stories we tell are fiction. And sometimes they're more tied in with the actual factual world we live in, sometimes less so. When a person reads a work of fiction, the implicit agreement between the reader and the author is that what is written in the story isn't necessarily true. But in order to build a good story, and without reinventing the wheel and every other thing on this or any other world, it's good practice to do a little research and fill out your story with things that resonate as true. Even if it's all couched in terrible, fascinating lies.

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Dialect and Language
Applying Writing Advice
Tenses and Person

Outlines
Research
Pacing
Personal Style
Tell the Story