Next Live Training:

Finding your research turns out to be the easy half. The hard half shows up a few weeks later, when the good stuff is scattered across forty-seven browser tabs, a folder on your desktop called “research,” and a note that just says “brass buttons” and you have no idea where it came from or why you wrote it down. This training is about what to do with everything you found.

We'll work through three stations: capturing a thing so it's still useful to you in six months, organizing it so you can find it a year from now without falling out of the writing, and actually using it. That last one is where most of the value hides, because the great majority of what you learn will never appear in your book. You won't need a new app to do any of this. The simplest version of the whole system is a folder with a few documents in it, and we'll build that first before looking at anything fancier.

Whether you're writing a cozy mystery, a sweeping fantasy, a picture book, or a family history (fiction or nonfiction, it's the same kit with different labels), you'll walk away with a system you can start this week, plus the Research Organizer: five fill-in templates you can copy for every book you write, and a printable reference handout to keep by your desk. We'll also cover how to weave research into a story without burying your reader in it, how to turn everything that didn't make the book into newsletter and bonus content, and the one-second habit borrowed from journalists that stops a rabbit hole from swallowing your whole writing session.