It's an arduous, difficult process. Especially so when writing a fully-fledged novel with several hundred pages worth of content that you have to sit down and somehow create something from nothing. Even though one of the laws of science is that you...
Well, if you do happen to be procrastinating on your homework, I also highly recommend you do that too— But what I really meant by "Do your homework," is:
"Research about the topics that will come up in your story."
I know— I already know that most of you are going to hate this chapter, since chances are, you came here to read 'cause you're trying to avoid doing work, but hear me out.
If you care about being able to be proud of your writing, or producing good stories, take this as a word of advice from a terrible writer to a potentially less terrible writer.
Now, I'm going to try to keep this chapter short and mostly full of examples. Because one, the last chapter was far too long, and two— it's extremely contextual.
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One of the many sins that I've seen here on wattpad especially— is that people tend to represent mental health, psychological issues/trauma, etc. without doing much research beforehand. Because of that, the contents of what they're writing is... less than stellar.
For instance, excessive physical contact such as hugging while their mental state has regressed into recalling memories similar to PTSD can actually make their condition worse.
Because there's a chance they'll begin to associate hugging with the memories that will bring stress-inducing flashbacks.
Even though the sensation is supposed to bring comfort, it may bring back traumatic memories instead.
Yet somehow that goes over the writer's heads because they don't do their homework and research about it.
As a result, multiple people might get angry, and chances are that many impressionable readers will think that it's correct in how you handle that situation, and try to put it in their books.
Worst case scenario— they might actually do that to someone in a similar situation in real life.
Even though it's called research, it's not that tedious. After all, google can make things very convenient when it comes to looking things up.
Now, what about if you do research about what you're writing about?
The readers that know about the source material are happy, you're able to pad out your story with a couple extra paragraphs, and you nail down the realism while simultaneously building and learning about things you didn't know.
That's four birds with one stone! Turning this into a habit can greatly increase your writing quality, and potentially make researching things for your story fun.
You'll be able to learn various things from researching and potentially impact more than just that one story.
Maybe while you're researching about mental heath, you get into World War II[where a notorious amount of people have gotten their scarred mental states] and get inspired to base off one of your Dark-Fantasy Medieval stories on one of the battles set in Germany.
Maybe base a character off of one of the famous people there, use a tactic in the real war and put it into your story and change it up a little. Replacing tanks with dragons and shock troops with fog-warriors, or something.
All of a sudden you're flowing with ideas and concepts, from a simple research session gone wild.
I learned just how much you can add to your story from being able to apply what you've learned in writing from roleplaying.
The scenario was that my character was cutting and dyeing the other person's hair. I thought: "Oh, you just snip off bits and pieces and then spread the dye, how difficult could it be?" and boy was I wrong.
Thankfully, I decided to look up the process and was able to add a lot more detail and bolster the quality of the entire scene just by researching it. The passage below is the result:
「As she sat down, Tengo slowly patted her head, almost gauging the moisture of her hair. This can work, he thought. Tengo slipped on some gloves, and gently combed her hair with his fingers, making sure to even out her hair into four small separate sections.
Tengo tilted her head backwards, letting her head relax on the backrest of the seat, and wrapped the upper-part of her body with a towel, covering her nape and shoulders, making sure not to get the dye on anything but her hair.
Lily had her eyes gently closed, almost as if she was so at peace that she could fall asleep at any moment.
"I'm starting," Tengo opened the flask of concentrated dye. The effects of the dye should be near-permanent, but he had to control the potency to make sure applying it to her hair wouldn't hurt Lily, or damage her hair in any way. It was a very precarious and delicate balancing act, but his anxieties were soon melted away as he applied it to her hair.
He applied the viscous black dye onto her hair, and started evenly working the dye into her hair, going from the roots of her hair to the ends.
Tengo's hands took on minds of their own, moving automatically without him needing to think much about it, as if they were possessed. No matter what he did, his hands kept gently moving through heir hair.
He carefully watched as her hair slowly was dyed in black. Her brown hair now taking on a much stronger color. Tengo's fear of hurting and damaging Lily's hair was washed away as he didn't see any change in her relaxed expression.
If she was in pain, or her hair was being damaged, Lily would be the first to react. He was relieved he did a good job.
The passage of time eluded the two. Tengo's hands finally spread the dye out evenly throughout Lily's full head of hair, from the roots to the ends. By the time Tengo was finished, he silently removed the gloves and checked to see if any of the dye spread to anywhere else.」
—I had no clue that you had to separate one's hair into four different sections, 'cause then you won't miss a patch of hair. Nor did I know it mattered whether you start at the root or the ends of one's hair— I thought it was like paint almost. And you start further or closer away from the roots of one's hair depending on how thick or full their hair is.
Normally, you wouldn't know that. Naturally, neither did I.
But if something you don't know about or aren't familiar with comes up in your story please, do yourself— and everyone around you a favor, and do your homework.
For those who don't know, the title comes from the phrase: "Well, someone sure did their homework," meaning that the person looked up the subject matter beforehand.
