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Research is your friend. Most of the (fiction) books that I enjoyed the most show how thoroughly researched they are. On virtually every topic you can find first-person accounts describing the exp...
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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/39312 License name: CC BY-SA 3.0 License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
#2: Initial revision
Research is your friend. Most of the (fiction) books that I enjoyed the most show how thoroughly researched they are. On virtually every topic you can find first-person accounts describing the experience. Read them, compare them, distill the essence from them. And yes, this includes death experiences, look for people who were revived after being almost dead. A lot of writers keep extensive notes and libraries on virtually every topic imaginable. I'm writing a short story placed in WW2 right now, something I haven't experienced, and I've made extensive use of online resources as well as my library including a 2000 page volume on WW2 that I bought and read two decades ago. The war was long before my time, but I can fill my story with details up to the type of wood used in the dining room of that passenger ship my characters are taking at one point, and I can write about the experiences and thoughts of my characters in this time by drawing the driving thoughts from the many eye-witness accounts available.