Nonfiction - the lessons learned

Back to the National Archives in Kew today, following up research leads offered from a member of a Great War forum ... lesson one, the Net is a great interactive research tool. I've run forums in the past, but never thought of joining one till now. They are a potential hive of experienced, passionate, eager colleagues.

Today I found a new trove of material for my J.S.Haldane book, as regards the war - stuff I didn't find on my independent search through the catalogues. It turns out that a geat deal of the material is not catalogued at all - you simply need to rummage wider in a subject area. I had done that before, but not in the best subject area. So lesson two, catalogues are only a start.

In academia I learned, painfully sometimes, to apply real rigour to footnotes. Often in my eagerness to note things down and dive back into the next piece of material, my references this time around have not been that accurate. Lesson three, write down all the reference numbers for footnotes. I'm certainly not going to be getting them again.

Lesson four is a part of that--collect a bibliography as I go along. I've been meaning to, just as I've been meaning to note down the names of all those who have helped me for the acknowledgments. It is all reclaimable, but it would have been much easier to have done so along the way.

Lesson five, while I am about it -- collect written permission to use material from possible copyright holders met through the course of the research. I suspect I'll have to be writing letters in a month or two's time.

Lesson six of course is to keep a better accounting of the considerable expenditure, keep a daily diary of what I've been up to so the figures add up. As the costs of research start to match the advance, the accountancy question looms.

All that, of course, means being rational - and the rationale of writing a book is a quirky one. I'll know better next time. But of course I knew better this. Knowing and applying are such different things.