Creative writing research helps to paint a more vivid picture
in your writing.

By writing what you know, you are employing a type of creative writing research. You are writing what you know, what you love, and what you find easy.

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Sometimes, however, creative writing research is more than that. It requires time, effort, and an eye for details that your readers will find intriguing, purposeful, and sincere.

When I was in high school, I participated in the forensics program for all four years. I tried my hand at a couple of different categories - informative speaking and storytelling. Informative speaking was more my niche. Each year that I participated in this category, I had the responsibility of preparing an informative writing piece that outlined, detailed, and adequately demonstrated the importance of my topic.

Freshmen year I wrote about children throughout history. Without researching this topic, my speech would have been a disaster. I learned about children in the Renaissance era, the Victorian era, and the present day. I talked about their clothes, their home lives, and their schooling. I needed to research, employ that research in my writing, and tailor it to fit the needs of the competition.

By junior and senior year of high school, I wrote speeches about Ripley's Believe It Or Not and the Barbie doll. These may seem like commonplace, ordinary topics. However, the truth of the matter is that there was so much to know and not nearly enough room to include it all in the five to eight minute time frame I was allotted.

Ripley's Believe It Or Not has many fascinating tales of interest, as they are all true, and choosing the ones that were most appalling, perplexing, and unpredictable proved harder than I would have thought. Sometimes the hardest part of creative writing research is choosing the best details and concepts to use.

The Barbie doll also seems ordinary. However, the main way you are told to choose a topic for informative writing is to find unique ideas that sound normal but have fascinating histories. The Barbie doll definitely matches these requirements. It is a part of almost every ethnicity and culture around the world. It has clothes, hairstyles, accessories, and careers of all different types. Writing a speech that incorporated all of this information, and making it interesting for my listeners was important. Without creative writing research, Barbie may have been deemed more ordinary than she truly is. Knowing her history and selecting the best ways to show her off to my listeners was my job after I had done the creative writing research that led up to the writing of my speech.

Whether you are writing about something you know very well or something you want to know more about, there is always room to do creative writing research. Use some creative writing prompts to get you researching and finding new ways to explore your chosen topic or genre.

Maybe you’ll find inspiration in organizations that seemed ordinary for their time, but have intricate histories and stories behind them, such as the Knights Templar. Scripts, such as those written for the Back to the Future trilogy, may also make you do some character mapping, as you discover that the town and characters all had to be placed perfectly into specific time frames to make the evolution of the town more believable. Researching a fake town and townspeople is no small feat. You have to work hard at making it seem as genuine as if it was really a place where your readers could find themselves living.

Along these same lines, if stories that have already been told pique your interest, think about the fascinating history of The Wizard of Oz. That story always seems as if it is done being told, and then someone comes along with a different take on how to view the world. Perspective is very important in research. How do different characters and different concepts make the story you are reading, hearing, or viewing more powerful? How do these perspectives shed a different light on what you once thought, and how you see things now? Jon Scieszka did a great job incorporating this concept into his story, The True Story of the Three Little Pigs. Different viewpoints require research into the life and times of your characters and your settings.

Poetry requires research also, as it is a form of writing unique to itself. For example, in order to write presidential poems, you should research and know interesting facts about the presidents. If you are eager to write poems about princesses, or you find yourself desiring to write about the leprechaun at the end of the rainbow in an Irish limerick, you must do research in order to make these ideas all the more real to you. Find out the details that seem ordinary, but can be made extraordinary through the way you present them in your writing. You will never believe just how much information is available out there that you didn't even realize related to your writing topic.

You must remember that just because the ideas you may be getting from research may not be yours, they don't have to be yours to be inspired by you. You are the master of your own work. Once you do your research and find your information, you are the one who is going to shape it and work it into your own writing masterpiece. You choose how to do this. It's your call. If you don't want to use some of the information you find, don't. Otherwise, incorporate it in the best way you possibly can. There is so much information out there. Don't let it go to waste. You will be doing yourself a disservice if you don't check out what's available to you in terms of creative writing research.

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