Good Googling
Think you know how to get the most out of Google? Alison Carter shares some ways to find the facts for your fiction without googling your way off-topic
I wear two ‘job hats’ – chartered librarian and writer of fiction. My bread-and-butter writing market is short stories, long reads and serials for the women’s magazines, and I’ve been lucky enough to publish many hundreds. My work now appears at least weekly in The People’s Friend, My Weekly and Woman’s Weekly.
I think I function best in the past, writing historical stories. This reflects my work in libraries, because the most rewarding task for most librarians is a research query. Over the years research for our library users has become less and less book-based. We find ourselves, to an ever greater extent, online.
I have trained hundreds of students in internet research. I try to give them tools and tips to save them time and get them information that’s reliable and targeted. One big problem with online research is what I like to call the ‘one o’clock in the morning trap’. Have you ever found yourself Googling some interesting topic at ten in the evening, only to glance at the clock on your PC and find that it’s tomorrow, and that your research has wandered into all kinds of fascinating areas, but not the one about which you wanted information? If you write fiction professionally, or even as a hobby, this can be a waste of your valuable writing time.
I’d like to share a selection of my Top Tips for Googling. Think of them as a geek’s appendix to the excellent and scholarly column in this magazine written by Tarja Moles. I think you will see my suggestions more as a ‘fast-food’ version of research guidance, and that you’ll see me as more a ‘Google abuser’ than a serious historical researcher, but I’m cheerful about that. My research is rarely in-depth; I generally need useful tit-bits about a historical period, a landscape, a town or a real character. Often, I just need a dash of colour: what would a working class man have worn in interwar Manchester? What was served for breakfast in the Tzar’s palace in 1902?