Writing is only half the fun.

Skillful writing begins with reading—lots and lots of reading. You’ve heard that before. Do I mean becoming intimately familiar with your genre? Absolutely. But I’m also talking about research; the cornerstone of historical fiction specifically, and all fiction in general terms. At the same time, good writers are astute observers of human nature, which means getting out in the world to watch and listen. Don’t stop there, however, because you have a whole cadre of professionals just waiting to jump in and help you out. Who are these splendid do-gooders you may ask? Social scientists. All fine and dandy, I hear you saying. Those folks locked away in their ivory towers won’t do me a lick of good, I don’t know any.

So, here’s the good news—you don’t have to know any academicians! A little-known tool that is freely available to anyone with internet access is called JSTOR. The archive bills itself as ‘...a digital library for the intellectually curious.’ Back in the day, such a resource was only available in a few places, such as a college library. This resource is now available to the public and provides up to one hundred free articles every month. This searchable database stores journal articles from social science and humanities for anyone to use. To date, JSTOR contains 12 million articles, images, and books, representing 75 disciplines.

No Dewy Decimals required

This online library of sorts is chock full of topics from anthropology to zoology and everything in between including folklore, history, law, religion, and hundreds of other subjects. You can browse curated collections or use the search engine to locate a topic you already have in mind, such as the History of Tap Dancing or Sufi Mysticism. Once you’ve honed the list of resources, it’s time to dive a little deeper. You can choose to tag a document and save it to a ‘workspace’ you create in a couple of ways. If the title alone looks interesting—tag it! If you’re not sure, a click on the document will show you the first page. A glance at the beginning of the article should tell you whether you want to plop it in your saved file.

As I said, writing is only half the fun. You can arrange and subdivide topics within your collection as many ways as you like. When it’s arranged, start reading. There’s only one small drawback to JSTOR. While you can read anything they have available, you may not download or copy it. The way around this is notes, which you can write in the field conveniently labeled ‘notes’ attached to the title. I usually leave myself breadcrumbs for later. My note might read ‘valuable source for details on eighteenth-century women’s dress’ to let me know that when I need that specific information, that’s where to find it. Another trick is to copy and paste the citation and dump it into the ‘research’ file in my writing software. In my case, I use Scrivener.

It can be easy, or right, but rarely both

At this point you might be saying ‘Sounds like a lot of work,’ and I’ll respond, ‘Relative to what?’ Certainly, not every author wants or needs an in-depth dive like JSTOR provides, but many do. You also might be saying ‘Why not just Google it?’ That’s fine if you’re comfortable with being wrong. If you want to do that, then why not just make up the answer yourself? Sure, machine guns were prevalent in the Roman Empire. But, if you want reliable sources to back up a ‘fact’ you read on Wikipedia, JSTOR is your go-to source for material vetted by experts in the field.

When I was researching my book Comfort’s Rebellion about a true-life historical figure named The Public Universal Friend, I had plenty to learn. In 1776, my character Jem Wilkinson recovered from a fever to announce she was dead, and a non-binary spirit had taken their place. They go on to build a ministry preaching salvation to New Englanders. Needless to say, I had a lot of work to do to believably place this individual in context. From the basics of the American Revolution to the role of religion in the colonies, and the diverse ways gender is experienced around the world and throughout history. JSTOR was a lifesaver, not only from the content itself but from each article’s reference list as well. Plus, I had tons of fun because what good writer doesn’t love to read?