Writing Group Thread: On Research
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Lately I’ve been working more intentionally on my next book. Today I’m also preparing for a class I’m teaching at University of Iowa on blending the personal and the cultural. I’m thinking a lot about research. About how it shows up in our writing— how we weave or braid or call it in. About how we manage the research materials— how we keep track of the texts or passages or diaries or family histories we’re exploring, and where that work fits into the writing process.
I’m curious how many of you are also thinking about this subject. Whenever I teach classes on the essay or memoir, someone inevitably asks a a question about organizing research. I’m always sad to say that I don’t have a proper system for doing so! How I engage with research changes for each project, but so does my writing practice.
I will say that I’m pretty consistently a big fan of stacking books in a somewhat organized fashion according to chapters, essays or projects, so that I can dip in and out of them as needed. Sometimes I’m citing those books directly in my work. Sometimes I’m just revisiting the same essay or idea or author over and over again. Sometimes I have a stack of books that are serving as formal inspiration for a project. In the past, I’ve also worked with diary entries and notebooks written by me or family members. I have a little plastic box of high school letters that I revisit whenever I’m thinking about my experiences as a teenage girl, and it’s a wild ride every time.
How do you engage with research, or with the voices of other writers and people, in your own writing? How do you organize that work, either before or when you draft?
Feel free to leave any and all questions about creative research— I’ll answer whatever I can.
And as always, let us know what you’re working on this week.