I received the latest issue of Mystery Scene recently and found an interesting little profile.

Simon Wood, author of the newly released Paying the Piper, has a one-page vignette about his research for the book, and how a visit to the FBI almost killed his story line when he found out the kidnapping he had planned would be solved too quickly in the real world. Apparently, Wood regularly does site visits as he also mentions visiting police stations, courts and a prison during the course of his research.

This contrasts with Charlane Harris’ approach of “making stuff up” for her paranormal mystery series (also interviewed in Mystery Scene).

To research or not to research is a question all writers come up against at some point in their careers. So the question is, when do you do the research, and when do you just let your imagination soar?

Okay, so I'm not directly going to address that question, but sometimes it’s necessary to do research because you just don’t know enough about a topic. If you want to write a story about an archeologist who gets murdered while on a dig in southern Laos and you know nothing about archeology or Laos, you might have some problems doing it well. So you decide to do a bit of research. How do you go about doing it?

First off, we have the lovely, omni-present Internet. Google and Wikipedia can give you the basics. Sometimes that’s enough. Libraries are also great for mounds of (reliable) information. Many writers just go to this point. They do enough research to not make huge and embarrassing mistakes (like saying Laos is in Africa when it's actually kind of sandwiched between Thailand and Vietnam) and then use their imagination for the rest.

Others go a little bit farther and go to see the places they want to write about. Site visits, like Wood’s visit to the FBI, are useful as they let you get a feel for the atmosphere and you get to ask direct questions. Site visits also let you experience details you might not have thought about on your own, including smells, sounds, and things like the floor plan.

Now you've been to the various locales for you book, but let’s say you want to talk to someone about a topic but have no connections to that field; how do you get one? First try working your personal connections a bit. You never know who your friends and family have connections to, or what they might have experienced in the past.

For example, if I wanted some insider info on teenagers working on a television show, I would start by talking to my cousin who was in her teens while working as a nanny on the set of the tv show "Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman." (Hmm…I wonder if she’s still in touch with anyone. I know she got Christmas cards from Jane Seymour for a couple years.) Seriously though, talk to the people around you and see what, and who, they know.

If you’re unlucky and even your neighbors don’t know anyone involved in professional dog shows, there are other ways to track people down. One option is to contact the local or national organization and ask for information or contacts. Most people are reasonably nice about helping you out since they want accurate information out there, and a bit of free publicity is rarely a bad thing. So if you want to talk to an educational consultant (someone who helps kids choose and apply to colleges), talk to HECA, WACAC or IECA.

For academic subjects, call or visit your local college or university. Even if the local history professor doesn’t know what kind of airplanes France used in WWI or what the dating behaviors of the middle class were during that period, they probably know who would and might be able to give you an intro.

Sometimes a more intensive or unconvential approach can be used. I read about one sci-fi author who found out an astrophysics conference was being held in her hometown. She attended several lectures and mingled with the scientists. She got answers to her questions and now has regular contacts she goes to with questions, and one even reads her drafts to check for glaring mistakes. Warning: Be careful with this technique not to become a stalker or psycho annoyance. It is best to do research ahead of time so you can ask intelligent questions and actually understand what you’re being told. Plus then you’re less likely to get thrown out a conference or lecture as a psychotic annoying stalker.

Now you’ve done all this research and, like Simon Wood, you find out what you had planned wouldn’t actually work. Well, you could just give up that idea and move on, or you could be like Wood who talked with the FBI for a while to figure out a way to modify his idea so it was believable.

See, that’s the fun of writing fiction. Sure, you go out and get all this great information, but you don’t have to create a world that’s exactly like this one. You stretch and modify things to make people look at things in a whole new way.

How much research you do is always up to the individual writer, and there really is no written rule about how accurate you have to be as long as the internal logic works. Just be aware of the fact you get a lot more leeway from readers about your decision to make inter-galactic travel work, in spite of the fact it wouldn’t, than you do for being an ignoramus who doesn’t know glass is basically just melted sand.