How Research Makes Meaning

The post below was part of my June 2025 e-newsletter. Subscribe to my newsletter to receive monthly writing tips and first dibs on workshops.

Since all the essays in my new collection, Shelter and Storm: At Home in the Driftless, incorporate facts I learned from asking experts, reading scholarly works, or rooting around in archives, I’m often asked about using research in creative writing.

When drafting a piece, I integrate facts intuitively—for instance, including only the most fascinating and original bits. But while revising, I deliberate on how the research enhances my prose.

Deployed skillfully, research deepens your work’s significance. It bolsters the connection between “what I experienced or observed” and “what this experience or observation means.” It offers readers not only new information, but also new ways of looking at the world.

Each essay in Shelter and Storm arose from some striking incident or discovery. While living in Wisconsin’s Driftless Area, it seemed all I had to do was step out the door and I would stumble into another topic, whether a record-breaking flood, a tornado, a rare, blue-glowing firefly, or a battle with beavers who kept damming a creek and flooding the neighbor’s field. Since I was curious and didn’t know a lot about the topics, I turned to research.

I love interviewing people, not only to tap their expertise, but also to find out how they feel. For one essay, I went to Louisiana and Mississippi to commiserate with landowners who had lost hundreds of acres of trees in Hurricanes Katrina and Rita right after I’d lost forty acres in a tornado. I rode around with foresters for three days. Those days are represented by maybe 200 words in that essay. I knew while sitting in the foresters’ trucks, viewing toppled trees and listening to descriptions of the storms, that I wouldn’t use most of what I was learning. But it felt important for me to get the full picture of what people were grappling with. I discovered that although those forests were plantations of pines destined for lumber mills, property owners still felt crushing grief over their loss.

When I teach writing, I talk about three elements that make up narratives: scene (what happened?), research (what else?), and reflection (what of it?). Each element enhances the others. Writers base the balance of these elements and where and how they intersect on their aims for a piece.

Research can be used strategically for:

• filling gaps
• connecting the personal with the universal
• complicating matters to add interest
• challenging claims to reinforce veracity
• offering a metaphor to support a theme
• raising tension or prolonging suspense
• mirroring structure

When you find the perfect fact or anecdote to add to your work, consider how it might support your material beyond simply adding background information.

But beware! One danger of researching is that the author will feel compelled to include more of what they learned than the reader needs. That’s why I advise writers to highlight during revision the material in their work belonging to scene, research, or reflection in different colors. Then, in your word processing program, zoom out until each page is the size of a playing card or smaller. You won’t be able to read the words, but you can see at a glance, by color, if you have a long section of research that’s likely bogging down the narrative. You can zoom in there and cut or redistribute those findings.

Research and scene come more easily to me than reflection. It takes me a while to articulate what I understand and feel about experiences. If you struggle with that, too, in revision, try responding to prompts such as:

• Only after learning ___________ did I realize ______________

OR

• I used to think ____________, but now I know _____________

What you’ve learned from experts, archives, and other sources will complement your experiences and observations and lead to new insights.