Befriend a historian.
Become one, marry one, sleep with one, or just buy a cup of coffee for one now and then. I have not met a historian yet who was not willing – no, eager – to babble on and on about his or her topic of expertise. Whether your question is more direct (“Who was Gaston de Bearn?”) or more vague (“What were Anglo-Gascon relations like in the late thirteenth century?”), you are certain to be rewarded with a delighted ramble.

Befriend a librarian.
If your local public library is good, use it. If not, visit a nearby college or university library; most have policies allowing guests during certain hours of the day. You won’t be able to check books out but you will be able to make photocopies to your heart’s desire and take notes till they kick you out at closing time.

Visit regularly. If there is a subject specialist for history – or more likely, the social sciences – talk to that librarian. If not, ask the librarian at the reference desk. Any librarian worth his or her salt will be more than happy to help you find what you need, even if you initially have to tell him or her exactly when the Regency was. Librarians are trained to FIND, not necessarily to know beforehand.

Doing research

If you are even remotely serious about writing historical fiction, you probably already have a collection of notes, images and other materials gathered from your research. If you haven’t, shame on you, start now. If you have and your notes are scattered over your desk, it is time to organize! You should of course do this in a manner conducive to your style but the better organized you are, the more usable your research. Here are some ways other people do this:

Binder
This is my preferred method. You will need:

• A three-ring binder, preferably one with that little black push-outer thing. I bought mine at the thrift store for a quarter.
• A three-hole punch (or regular access to one). Invest in one if necessary.
• Tab dividers. I did mine on the cheap with page flags but you can buy nifty plastic ones with replaceable inserts.
• Hole reinforcers. You know, the little Cheerio-shaped sticky ones.

Organize your binder into topics, using your tab dividers. Topics will vary with your time period. Someone working with the Regency will probably have a big section on clothing while a WWI binder would have a large collection of maps and battle layouts. I chose to divide mine into large general topics, then subdivide. My big topics are “Maps”, “Places”, “People”, “Daily Life” and “God”. “People”, for instance, is divided into “Nobles”, “Families”, “Officials” and so on.

Chances are, you will eventually need more than one binder. I began with “Wales” as a section but it soon expanded into its own binder. Keep absolutely everything, even when you finish a particular book. It is much easier to store a binder than start fresh if you decide to go back to Damascus and Acre two projects from now.

Notecards
When I wrote my undergrad thesis, I experimented with this method. It didn’t work for me but some people swear by it. You will need:

• Notecards. (Um…yeah.) Most people use 3 x 5 index cards but the 5 x 7 ones are better if you plan to have lots of images.
• A box to keep them in.
• Tab dividers. You can buy them special or make them.
• Markers, stickers, or some other way to code them.

Basically, you write one fact and one fact only on each card. Then you code them in some way (I used markers) to denote what general topic each fact relates to. Organize them in their box, then when you need to know the order of courses of an average Renaissance feast, you flip through the cards to “Food” (or whatever you called the section) and voila!

The drawback is that this can get expensive, buying the reams and reams of cards you will need. It is also harder to accommodate larger images. But it is infinitely expandable, usable (no sorting through pages for one specific fact) and easy to update and maintain. However, it could get ugly if you spilled the cards.

The advantage to both of these methods is that they are both highly portable, which is advantageous if you must share desk space with a spouse/roommate/child or you only have access to a computer outside your home. You can put your binder or box under your arm and have it readily available when you need it. Then you can quick-check a fact as you put it in (if that is your style).

A note on notes
Some writers eschew organization altogether and leave their research scattered across their desks at random. They have pages of handwritten notes and claim they can find any fact in moments. How this can work in historical fiction I cannot imagine, but I have already received flak from writers who operate this way.

I shall repeat: DO WHAT WORKS FOR YOU. I maintain that historical fiction is based on solid research and through organization you can make information accessible and usable. You work hard to do the research. You should not have to work hard to locate it again.

For all methods
Even though your work is fiction and not a scholarly production in the strictest sense, you will find it advantageous to scrupulously cite the items you use. If you copy a map, note where it came from. Ditto for images of clothing, food or buildings. Direct quotes always need page numbers. You will not need to cite information in your fiction (unless you quote, and then you might need to obtain permission) but I still recommend it for two reasons.

1 – It is good form and good habit.
2 – You will be very glad of it later if you want to get that same book again. It is unspeakably maddening to have a great image of a castle and KNOW it came from a useful, engaging book, but not be able to recall the title.

You can go about this in several ways:

Numbering
This is probably the easiest way. Record the bibliographic information of a book or article (author, title, publisher, year etc) and give it a number. Put that number in the corner of copied material and note it in the margin of any relevant quotes. You will be able to refer to the number to know the name of the source. You can record the bibliographic information on index cards or on a spreadsheet for easy access.

Name-Title
In place of a number, put the author’s last name and first word of the title, still being careful to record the bibliographic data of the work.

Color-coding
I don’t recommend this on its own as you are liable to run out of colors before you run out of sources. But it is extremely useful when combined with one of the abovementioned methods. You can further subdivide and organize your topics by color, making it easier to locate in a hurry.

Start a library

You probably already have started this without even realizing it. Books are expensive but having the ones you use all the time can prove invaluable. And books don’t have to be expensive. I’ve bought some of my most useful books at thrift stores, garage sales and library book sales. Finding cheap used books only requires a little effort. Here are some I recommend having around:

• A dictionary. Yes, I know you can look up words online but having a print dictionary is often faster and provides less distraction. It doesn’t have to be brand new. Historical fiction does not require a volume of tech jargon.
• A thesaurus. Ditto with the online. People who use word-processing programs will probably rely on the thesaurus feature but it can be supplemented with a good print version.
• A grammar book, especially if you stink at commas, semicolons and dangling participles.
• A book of baby names. Character names should be chosen with care and a good baby name book will provide etymology and meaning for lots of names. This will be less useful for those writing in certain time periods but you never know what will strike a chord.
• A good general history of your time period. This is helpful for quick reference (“Now which month was the Battle of the Somme?” “How was Saladin’s name spelled in Arabic?”).

Also, consider saving copies of articles you read. Consider putting them into file folders, labeling them and keeping track of their names and authors. It does not take a lot of time to note in a spreadsheet the bibliographic data (make sure to note the volume and issue numbers, as well as the page numbers). You will save yourself a lot of hassle if you need it again, especially if you had to go through a lot to get the article.