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“Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.”

-Albert Einstein-

I’ll be honest: I hate doing research before or during the writing of a story. Just the thought of it transports me back to my high school and college days, when I would do almost anything (even clean my room) to avoid actually cracking open a textbook to study for a test or prepare a paper. I wasn’t a bad student, really Mom, I wasn’t, just not always the most motivated.

And perhaps this scholastic allergy flared up again when I sat down to write my first novel, The Chronicles of What Happened, by Cam Hanson. The story deals with regression therapy and analysis, two areas I had little knowledge of, but I didn’t immerse myself in either subject before I started writing. I decided to know as much as my fifteen-year-old protagonist/narrator would know after observing his parents being treated by a mostly unethical therapist who until very recently had been a hypnotist hired out for children’s birthday parties. So I didn’t go in completely blind. I did buy a book  called Second Childhood: Hypno-Play Therapy With Age-Regressed Adults, written by Marian Kaplan Shapiro, which did give me a good sense of how a therapist would actually conduct a regression session. But then I filtered that information through my characters and let my imagination fill in the rest.

Alas, as any writer knows, even minimal research is essential in order to spin an honest and authentic tale. And of course I understand its value. Research can aid in enriching the details of every element important to a strong, engaging story, and at the same time improve (hopefully) the intelligence and insight of the author. So even though, in my opinion, it’s robust imagination that is power, knowledge too deserves its own pedestal.

Research is on my mind again as I continue to develop my next project, a YA supernatural-horror novel called The Shaded. The genre itself leaves me plenty of room to imagine and make things up, but central to my story is a sinister occultist organization whose front company is a vanity press that produces nonfiction books on the supernatural, the occult, and various unexplained phenomena. Even though, ala Cam Hanson, my narrator/protagonist is a teenager unfamiliar with most of this, there are several characters who he interacts with who have spent their lives devoted to this area.

So I must know what they know.  I must bite the bullet and hunker down and embark on some serious learning. At least its a subject I’m actually interested in and curious about; I no longer have to fear it’ll be like the chemistry class in 11th grade that I only passed because I helped the teacher clean the lab after school. Right?

Anyway, while I regress and repair that trauma, I’d love to hear what you think about research when it comes to writing fiction. And if you happen to be into the supernatural, the paranormal, etc., please feel free to recommend any good books on the subject.