A trick I often use to keep my research organized and tight when I’m beginning a story is so very simple, but I’m not sure many people think about it so I’m going to share it here.
I do a lot of web based research when I’m writing stories. Of course like most writers I would prefer to investigate, especially places, in person. I mean if you’re going to write about Egypt who wouldn’t want to go there and experience first hand everything you’ll use in your story? Unfortunately that’s not normally possible for me.
As I said, I do oodles of web research. Search after search with each one usually landing lots of hits. Most of the hits aren’t worth much, but when I land on an article that rings true or looks like if has background that I can use to educate and familiarize myself with my setting (physically or culturally) I like to save it. While there are lots of ways to save a website or search result, not all of them are permanent or accessible without internet.
In comes Apple iBook. Now, even though I use a Microsoft Surface Pro to do a large portion of my writing and most of my file organization, I use an Apple iPhone and iPad. Both come with the iBook app and I find it very useful for organizing research. If I come across a website hit I want to save for later or simple save, I go to the bottom of my iPhone or iPad and hit the share button (a square box with an up arrow on top of it). On the upper list of options that comes up I choose “Save PDF to Books” and the article is automatically loaded into my iBooks. If you don’t see the iBooks symbol you can add it to the list by choosing “More” and turning it on.
Once the document is in iBooks you can also organize it into different “collections” of your own imagination. Now I can read it at my leisure, make notes on it, mark pages, etc. In the example attached in the picture I’m doing some research on Luxor and Karnak Temples in Egypt.
Hope this helps your own writing research organization as well. Please share your own tips in the comments below. Happy writing!