Cursory research on historical or otherwise unique settings can give you enough facts to establish a time or place, but sometimes you need more to make your reader feel like they are really living in your novel. In an article for Writer’s Digest, Blake Sanz offers advice for the kind of deeper research that can help you create an emotional resonance with your setting.
This is especially true when writing about cultures not our own. “We ought to be open as writers to exploring emotional and psychological territory beyond our own,” Sanz writes. “But in swimming out into those treacherous waters, there has to be an expansion of what you feel you ought to know before you write places, people, and times you’re unfamiliar with.”
To fully immerse yourself in a place or time other than your own, Sanz recommends that you:
- Read fiction in which people, places, and times like the ones you’re creating appear.
- Read memoirs by people who resemble the characters you want to write.
- Engage with entertainment your character might have enjoyed.
