Research, research, research.
My students will probably laugh when they see this post. And they'll more than likely think I'm even crazier than they already thought I was. Nonetheless, I must confess:
I love to research.
I do. And I'm not ashamed of it. I'll even say it again: I. Love. To. Research.
In fact, I relish reading and learning and discovering and being endlessly surprised and amazed at how the most divergent threads of our world's history have such common strands.
Try it. (It works for Wikipedia, which is a veritable labyrinth of research bliss.) Pick up any stray thought, person, or event (familiar or brand new to you), and follow it. Before long, you'll come across connections that are both familiar and brand new to you. Any thread you pick up connects in some way to the rest of history like some epic game of Six Degrees of Separation.
The catch--because everything has one--is knowing when to stop. Wikipedia may be a labyrinth of bliss, but it's still a labyrinth. The corridors of research can be a maze that's all too easy to get lost in.
For me, the catch is knowing when to say "Enough!" (temporarily, at least). To exercise the discipline of NOT clicking the next bit of blue text in an endless chain of tantalizing wikilinks. I need to step away from the information buffet in order to digest the tetrabytes of information I just gorged on and turn it into something nutritional to my writing instead of just gratuitous brain candy.
So this is me saying now's the time. With self-imposed deadlines hurtling at me over what used to be the far-away horizon, I'm realizing the reality of two sides of the same coin:
1. It's time to put down the (virtual) encyclopedia and pick up the pen. Research alone isn't going to write a book. It just provides the raw materials.
2. I've put enough of those raw materials into my writer's brain that I can now "trust" myself to produce the magic. I have all the threads I need, now's the time to make my own connections, to build my own wikiworld of interwoven histories.
It's time to put that research to some seriously good use.
You're not alone. I love learning about things. You're probably like me where you hear of something and you're like "I wonder what this is, or how that works"? and then you dig into it online. Probably the most recent thing I researched was the underground tunnel systems supposedly located throughout most of France / Europe.
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