Fiction is weird. It leads you down paths of thought you hadn’t anticipated going down. This is often exciting, but it can also be troubling when you want your work to feel real to the reader. The substance of fiction is in the details. If you want your fiction to hold weight, you have to get those details right.

The answer, of course, is research. You look up the details and fold them into the fiction in some non-plagiarized form. For example, before writing my current novel, I researched the California Gold Rush and the history of famous cults and Utopian communities. That’s all well and good, because there’s lots of information on those two things. It’s the obscure questions that leave me hanging. Too often, there simply isn’t all that much information about the things I want to know about.

Some questions I have Googled lately:

And etc.

I’m not saying there are no answers to these questions. I’m saying the Internet is not prepared to answer them! And I really don’t want to shift through endless books to find out the answers. But in the end, that’s probably what I’ll end up doing–or else cut the scene. Or … guess.