The research minimum
Research rabbit holes kill more books than writer's block. The mechanism is seductive: every article leads to another, every Wikipedia page has twenty interesting links, and two hours later you have not written a word but you know a great deal about medieval grain storage. The research minimum is the discipline of knowing when you know enough. Define your minimum before you start: 'I need to understand daily life in this period, the political climate, and the physical geography of the setting.' Once you can answer those questions with confidence, start writing. The gaps will become visible in the draft.
Beta readers and sensitivity readers as research supplements
Beta readers are your first audience and your first fact-checkers. A reader who lives in the city your novel is set in will catch the wrong subway line before your editor does. A reader with professional expertise in the field your protagonist works in will catch the procedural errors. Sensitivity readers bring lived experience to representation questions that secondary sources cannot fully address. Use them after a complete draft, not during, because you need a full draft to give them something substantive to respond to. Their notes are research you could not have done alone.
The research journal
A research journal is a dedicated document or notebook where you record everything you find: sources, key facts, quotes you might use, contradictions between sources, and questions that need more investigation. The discipline of recording as you go prevents two expensive problems: forgetting where you found something (attribution is important in non-fiction) and rediscovering things you already researched (which happens more than any writer admits). Date each entry and note the source. After a research session, write a two-sentence summary of what you learned. The summary is what you will actually use when you draft.
Primary vs. secondary sources
Secondary sources, history books, biographies, documentaries, are faster and more accessible. They are fine for most fiction. Primary sources, original letters, diaries, legal records, contemporary news, give you texture that secondary sources cannot. The person who actually lived through an event uses different language, notices different things, and has a different emotional register than the historian who describes it two hundred years later. For historical fiction specifically, finding even a handful of primary sources gives your period detail an authenticity that all the secondary research in the world cannot replicate.
Setting research: maps, photographs, and street-level detail
The most convincing settings are built on specific, sensory details that only come from either being there or finding records made by people who were. For contemporary settings: Google Street View, local photography groups, subreddits for the city or region, travel blogs with photographs. For historical settings: photography archives, period maps, newspaper archives, travel writing from the era. The details you want are not the famous landmarks but the ordinary things: what the streets smelled like, what the light was like, what ordinary people did on a Tuesday afternoon. Those are the details that make a setting feel inhabited.
The research-later flag for first drafts
Stopping mid-draft to research a specific fact costs more than the fact is worth. The research interrupts your drafting flow, leads to broader reading than the specific fact required, and turns a focused writing session into a browsing session. The solution is the research-later flag: a bracketed placeholder like [RES: what year was this bridge built?] that marks the gap and lets you keep moving. After the draft is complete, run a search for [RES: and fill each one in a dedicated research session. The separation keeps drafting fast and research thorough, with no contamination between the two modes.
