Dear Thursday: Research and Other Loaded Guns

I'm most looking forward to shooting this gun, which is the same one used by my favorite slut, James Bond. Photo Credit: Mskadu

So I’m going to the gun range to shoot guns today w/ a friend of my husband’s who knows about guns. And yes, for the friends that know me IRL, I’m still a pacifist, but I’m rewriting a very violent book. As you do. So I need to do some in-person research.

Should be interesting. I mostly just want to figure out which character shoots what and how it feels for them to shoot what they’re shooting.

This is actually the fun part of writing. Last year, I got to go to Solvang to research a climatic moment in 32 Candles, and I’ve already decided that both Catalina and Hawaii will appear in my next women’s fiction novel.

On the subject of research, I like to not bother with it until I’m in rewrites, b/c it’s a little too fun and can quite easily become yet another form of procrastination. But I know a lot of writers pride themselves on their research, and spend years doing it before they set pen to paper. In a way, though, I feel that life in general is research, so for the most part, one needn’t do a bunch of it if one wishes to write. But it does matter what you’re writing, and of course the research is the best part for a lot of writers.

To the other writers who read this blog, how do you handle research?

Also, what does one wear to a gun range? And yes, yes, I’ll try to get pictures.