It happens to the best of us: You’re writing, making progress in a story, and suddenly you realize that you’re missing a piece of real-world information. Like, say, you’re writing a story about an aspiring singer, and you’ve got an idea for a scene where they practice a song in the privacy of their room, and you realize you don’t really know what kind of song they would choose to practice. Or you’re writing a spy thriller and your character needs to buy a gun, and you realize you have no idea what kind of gun they would choose or even what the considerations are.
Hey, it happens. We can’t know everything. No matter how widely you read, travel, and interrogate alarmed strangers on public transportation, no writer can know every single thing that might seem like it belongs in your story. And a really bad habit a lot of young writers is to stop what they’re doing in order to ask for suggestions on what detail to include.
Dear Hive Mind
On the one hand, this is just research, right? It’s something a huge number of writers do in order to get the real-feel aspect of their writing on point. And that’s true, and there’s nothing wrong with doing a bit of research to get your facts straight. And with the Internet it’s soooo easy to stop writing and just ask a million strangers what they think.
What I advise against, however, is stopping cold to poll the room or the Internet for a suggestion. All this accomplishes is ruining your flow and rhythm, taking you out of your story and holding you up while you debate what’s probably an unimportant detail in your story. Because if it’s important, then you probably would have encountered while conceptualizing your idea. If you’re knee-deep in the narrative before you realize you’re lacking, like, crucial information, you’re doing it wrong.
Another reason to avoid this is that it can easily become an excuse to give up, or at least take an extended break. The Internet is enough of a distraction. Don’t go down a rabbit hole about what kind of shoes your main character would wear to a cocktail party unless those shoes are the murder weapon or something.
And if it’s not crucial, it’s not worth stopping for. Put in a placeholder and fix it in revision.
Pausing to have a drink and stare heroically off into the distance, pondering your work-in-progress? That’s fine. And kind of sexy.