: Re: Can a person get bogged down by science fiction research? I discovered my interest in writing a few years ago. I was extremely stressed out from work, and so out of the blue, I sat down

@Angie602

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Here are a few principles I think can help you in your present difficulty:

Research is great as long as it isn't blocking you from writing.
Assume your first draft and your final draft are going to be nothing alike.
Unresearched ideas are great stopgaps for researched ideas.
"Easy" answers to your questions are great stopgaps for "good" answers to your questions.

As others have said, the key challenge is to get writing. Some degree of research can be fantastic, ground you, give you ideas to spin off of. Ninety books of research, before you even start, is not what you need to accomplish those goals.

Your goal here should be to get yourself, as quickly as you possibly can, to the point where you're writing something. It might be a character scene that has nothing to do with the science or the worldbuilding. Or it might be all about the setting and your concepts, but probably only one or two or three of these questions, and then you only need to answer those right away.

You might get something wrong. You might change things later. Your answer to some of those questions, if you answer a couple of them today, tomorrow, off of an idea that sounds cool instead of thorough research, might not be the best possible. That's OK.

Because here's the thing: stories evolve in the writing. What you think you need now, might be very different than what you turn out to need three chapters in. Something that would take a month of research might turn out to not even be mentioned. And, so much of the research you want to do, you'll do better and be more effective, if you're already writing -- if you've got the focus of knowing what you need and what's necessary for your story. So you can write a rough scene today, answering a few questions with answers that are simple, or random, or that just seem cool at the moment. And once you've done that, researching in order to rewrite the scene or fix it up, can be much, much easier.

Researching and writing are two very, very different muscles. You can probably do them both in parallel -- write in the morning, research in the evening; write one day, research the next. I'm not saying "don't research." I'm just saying, balance research with getting writing done -- and try assuming that research will often come in more for the rewriting stage, than for the initial draft.

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