Research over Writing

Some of you may remember a time when to do proper research, you would have had to spend hours in a library, searching through rows of books. If they were reference books, then you wouldn't have been allowed to take them home, so you would have to sit there, gathering as much information as possible, to make use of it later. As pleasurable as libraries are, it was pretty hard work.

Now, with the Internet, it's quite opposite. There is so much information available at our fingertips, that you look for "how to create characters" and you find thousands of sites, offering articles, exercises and god knows what else.

I sometimes start with an intention of doing a quick research. Just to look something up. More often than not, the site I am looking at, would have links taking me to other sites, and from there, I would end up on yet different sites. All of them offer such fascinating, interesting information, that I end up thinking, "Oh, I will just read this. It may come in useful."

And guess what? It may be useful, but definitely not very useful because while I stuff my head with all these information, I am not writing. Writing is the only way a writer's skill is honed. I am a keen seeker of knowledge, so I find it extremely hard to stop attaining new information. But then no one said road to becoming a published author was easy to travel.