Research Rocks

Posted by Stacey on September 26, 2015 in education, Humor, Hush, Imagination, Inspiration, Lakeview Novels, life, Research, Scream, Silence, Travel, Whisper, writing | 0 comments

You can’t write what you don’t know.

Sure, books and the internet are great ways to find out about your subject, but the best way to research your story is to live it.

For the Lakeview Novels I tried to do just that.

While researching Hush (the story of an unknown princess who is discovered by an undercover student journalist and hunted down by terrorists on the campus of her elite boarding school) I went to several rugby games – a really great sport that I had little knowledge of before starting the story. I rowed in an eight seat crew boat. I spent hours on boarding school campuses and I actually walked the dangerous road and almost got hit by a car like my characters in chapter 35.

For Whisper (a paranormal adventure about enemies who come together after discovering a haunted journal that leads them on a search to find a lost school treasure.) I interviewed people who’d seen ghosts and went on a couple of ghost hunts myself. Unfortunately, I didn’t see anything, but it was totally worth the experience.

Silence, (Searching for answers about the father she never knew, Blakely Henry, now Queen of Tamura, takes her family on a cross-country adventure through the hill towns of Southern France.) was the best research I’ve done by far because I got to go to the South of France and really explore the towns and places I wrote about. If you look under my past blog postings, you can see several of the pictures I took while there.

Then, when it came to Scream (A student witnesses a murder and discovers that the school cook is  drug dealer on the lamb). I walked the decks of our local ferry boats where the murder at the beginning of the book takes place, attended a car auction and interviewed an amazing detective who’d been part of several  drug busts and murder investigations.

Pretty cool, right?

So the next time someone rolls their eyes when you mention researching something you’re writing, shake your head and say, “It’s not what you think!”

Happy Reading – Stacey