Writing is hard. How’s that for a downer first thing in the morning? But it’s true—particularly when it comes to finding time to write. There are so many necessary tasks—marketing, networking, running a business, etc.—fighting for your time. And then, once you do get down to the planning, drafting, or revising you’ve been longing to do, you’re often sidetracked by another necessary part of the process: figuring out how to research your book.

Precious time is wasted as we search the Internet for just the right information to elevate our storytelling. Plus, we often get sidetracked when we can’t find what we’re looking for. Our workspace is littered with thumbed-through reference books that don’t contain exactly what we need. All of this effort spent trying to find the right resources eats into our work time, making it difficult to do the one thing we want and need to do: write.

3 Ways One Stop for Writers™ Can Help You Figure Out How to Research Your Book

Well, Writers Helping Writers has a new idea that we think will help. We (Angela Ackerman and Becca Puglisi) have teamed up with Lee Powell (creator of Scrivener for Windows) to create One Stop For Writers™—a website dedicated to helping authors elevate their storytelling and reduce the downtime commonly associated with research.

One Stop For Writers™ provides writers…

1. An Array of Helpful Resources in One Convenient Spot

When I’m writing or revising and I have to stop to research something, my chances of getting distracted and wasting time go up exponentially. One Stop for Writers helps with this by compiling a collection of helpful descriptive resources in one place.

Less time is wasted because you’ll find more of what you need and you’ll find it quickly, without ever having to leave the site. Just log in, get the creative brainstorming help you need, and get back to writing.

2. Resources on a Variety of Topics.

A good book, script, or story is comprised of many different elements. In order to be successful authors, we need to master all of them:

• Characterization

• Symbolism

• Settings

• Character emotion

• Multi-sensory description

• Show-don’t-tell

One Stop for Writers contains resources to help you master all of these elements and more. Among other things, you’ll find the entire Writers Helping Writers descriptive thesaurus collection, enhanced and updated to include even more entries and information. You can also find original worksheets, questionnaires, flowcharts, and other customizable tools that you can save and print out at your convenience.

Need help researching a hard-to-reach setting? Pop in to the Setting Thesaurus, grab some ideas, then get back to drafting.

Wondering how to show your character’s feelings of scorn or elation? Click on the desired entry of the Emotion Thesaurus, and you’re off to the races.

Need a refresher on who your character is at his core? Review the Character-At-A-Glance and Character’s Fears worksheets that you created weeks ago in the planning stage, then use the information to write your character realistically.

3. Cross-Referenced and Searchable Resources

Not only are all of our thesauri now in one convenient place, they’re cross-referenced and completely searchable.

Let’s say you’re struggling to adequately express a common theme in your story. So you go to One Stop and do a quick search for “isolation.” Immediately, you see responses in a variety of areas. The Symbolism and Motif Thesaurus contains a whole entry on the topic. Both the Weather and Settings Thesauri contain phenomena and locations that can emphasize this theme. The Positive and Negative Trait Thesauri each mention traits that may emerge as a result of isolation, and the Emotion Thesaurus has information on what an isolated character might be feeling and how to convey that to readers.

Just one search, and you’ve accomplished all of this helpful research—all without leaving the One Stop site.

The bottom line here is that Angela, Lee, and I are all writers. We understand how difficult it can be to get the actual writing done when you’re constantly having to stop and look stuff up. This is why we created One Stop for Writers, so writers can have a compilation of the resources they need, all in one convenient place.

If you’re curious about One Stop For Writers, check us out. Our hope is that it will streamline your research process and give you more of what you really want: time to write.

Wordplayers, tell me your opinion! What would be helpful to you in figuring out how to research your book? Tell me in the comments!