Research your book for depth

I remember being told 'write what you know about'. And I thought, 'but I don't want to write about a normal life, a happy childhood, getting an education and building a career'. I want to write about strange people and creepy stuff; action, adventure, romance and magic. I want to escape in the writing and in the reading of my stories. I want to be able to travel to another space in time in my books, and hopefully write in such a way that it transports my readers too.

Enter a drastic change in approach with the advent of the internet. Now, I don't need to know about something I want to write about, I can find out anything I want online. Technology has provided us with a fantastic resource for delving deep into the secrets of anything we choose. I'm not sure that reading about it or researching it will ever replace the actual experience of being there, but my imagination is a powerful tool and if I remember to bring in the five senses, I can conjure up some very real people and places.

The trick is then getting them into words on a page that paint a picture which the reader sees in his/her mind. When I paint my picture with words, I need to keep in mind that my readers have vivid imaginations too. I want to leave just enough little blanks so they can fill them in in a way that they relate to.

Someone asked me the other day... "Did you I actually walk along all those roads in Rome that appear in Deadly Obsession?" Yes, I did. Deadly Obsession being my first novel, I wanted to really feel the story as I wrote it. Now I know what that feeling is like, I can create stories in my mind and imagine how it feels to be immersed in a situation.

Its funny, but I remember thinking the self same thing about Dan Brown in his descriptions of the streets in the Da Vinci Code! Had he actually walked those streets and seen the things he spoke of? I don't know if he did or not, but I've just heard an interview with him on his new book Inferno, and he said it took him 3 years to write it, 1 of those years being purely research!