Research

Research is how you earn the reader’s trust. It is also how you postpone the writing. Learn enough to be specific, then stop.

A novel set in a real trade, a real city or a real decade will be tested by someone who lives there. One precise detail — the right tool, the right bus, the right insult — buys a great deal of forgiveness. A wrong one, placed where a specialist will see it, can throw them out of the book for good. So do the work. Talk to people who do the job. Read what they read. Visit the street if you can.

Then leave most of it in the notebook. Research on the page is often the writer showing their homework. A character does not explain their own profession to themselves. They use it. The reader will pick up the craft from the verbs.

When you do not know a fact and the scene is moving, mark the gap and continue. A blank in brackets is more honest than a confident invention you will have to unpick. Do not let a morning of research become a month in which the novel does not advance. The story is the point. The facts are there so the story can be believed.