How do you research a novel?

Jeffrey's answer

I research a novel before I write it, while I write it, and after I have written it. Each phase has a different purpose, and skipping any of them shows in the final book.

Before I write, I read everything serious that has been written about the world I am going to set the book in. For Adam & Eve, that meant reading Churchill’s speeches, the Cabinet papers from 1940, Operation Sealion documents, German strategic plans for an invasion of Britain. It meant reading historians — Andrew Roberts, Niall Ferguson, Leo McKinstry. It meant going to the British Library and looking at the actual newspapers from May and June 1940 to understand what people thought was happening at the time, which is rarely what historians later decided was happening.

While I write, I keep a notebook of details that need checking. The colour of a uniform. The make of a car. The exact phrase a vicar would have used in 1940 versus 1942. I do not stop the writing to check these things — that destroys the flow — but I flag them, and at the end of each draft I check every flag. Roughly one in five of those details turns out to be wrong, and the wrong details are the ones that make a reader put the book down. Get the small details right and the reader will follow you anywhere. Get one wrong and they will doubt the rest.

After I write, I do something writers rarely talk about: I send the manuscript to specialists. For Adam & Eve I sent the wartime chapters to a military historian and the Cabinet scenes to a constitutional scholar. They came back with corrections that genuinely improved the book. Leo McKinstry’s Operation Sealion, which I read late in the process, made me rewrite three chapters from scratch — because what I had written was the comfortable myth of 1940, and McKinstry showed me the harder truth. The harder truth made the book better.

Research is not a luxury. It is the foundation. The reader who knows nothing about the period will trust you. The reader who knows everything about the period — and there will always be one — will be your toughest critic, and the only one whose opinion really matters.

A few practical notes

• Start with three good general books on the period or subject. Not academic monographs — well-reviewed popular histories. Andrew Roberts, Antony Beevor, Mary Beard.
• Then go to primary sources. For UK historical fiction, the British Newspaper Archive gives you searchable newspapers from the period — invaluable for the texture of what people actually thought. Hansard covers UK Parliament debates back to 1803.
• Walk the locations. If your book is set in Mallorca, go to Mallorca. Most novels with a strong sense of place involve a writer who showed up.
• Build a ‘fact file’ alongside the manuscript. Spreadsheet or notebook: every fact you’ve checked, with the source. When the copy editor flags it, you can defend it.
• Send draft chapters to specialists. A military historian for the war chapters. A doctor for the medical scenes. A solicitor for the courtroom. They’ll catch errors that 99% of readers won’t notice — but the 1% who notice are the ones who write reviews.
• Don’t over-research. Three months of solid research is usually enough. Beyond that, research becomes procrastination.
• Wikipedia is a starting point, not a citation. Use it to find the real sources at the bottom of the page.