The when and where of research

I'm handling the first pass at draft three. I'm about 50 pages in.

So what am I working on?

I'm fixing and cleaning up dialogue, but I'm also doing something else that is very, very important.

This is the research draft.

When you're writing, you'll occasionally find yourself writing about places you've never been. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but it does necessitate some level of research.

Much of our screenplay takes place in a psychiatric hospital. Since we've never actually been inside one (and since psychiatric hospitals are not really in the habit of putting photos on the Internet), we had to do research. Or, I did. I like to do research; Jeffrey doesn't. One of the many benefits of having a writing partner is working things out like this!

Jeffrey and I have been writers long enough to know that you can't do every bit of research ahead of time. And if you're in the middle of writing a compelling scene, stopping to look up all of those bits every ten seconds is going to guarantee a crappy scene.

So what we usually do is put in placeholders. Example:

THERAPIST
I'm going to prescribe a light dose of SomeDrug.

In this case, we did basic room description and placeholders for the scientific talk that would undoubtedly come from the therapist. Then, in this draft, I did the research and fixed the descriptions and jargon based on what I found. In this example, I'm just putting a generic name in there. I can invent a medication, or I can look up a real one. I used to be a medical editor, so I'm not really concerned that I won't be able to find something plausible.

Now there were a few details that I wanted in regards to the psychiatric hospital's cafeteria. We'd set a few scenes there, and I wanted to know a little more about what types of safety measures they took, what kinds of food were served, etc. Normal Internet research methods yielded very little.

So I went to Yahoo! answers and asked.

I had four responses within the day from people who had actually been in psychiatric hospitals or psychiatric wards. Of course this isn't genuine scientific research, but it's close enough in my estimation, and among the folks who responded, there was a general consensus on many points. So I felt good about that.

Research doesn't have to be daunting. You just have to know where to look -- and when to look. Don't be afraid to throw some placeholder text in there just to get your scenes on paper. It'll be OK, I promise. :)