Planning a research trip for your novel sounds romantic in theory: immersive days in a meaningful place, pages accumulating, the book finally taking shape. What actually happens is usually messier, more frustrating, and (if you let it be) far more useful.

Most guides on how to research a novel will give you a toolkit: start with primary sources, interview locals, mine YouTube for period footage, organize your notes in Scrivener. That advice is sound, and worth following. What those guides rarely address is what happens when you actually go somewhere for your novel, leave your desk, travel to the place, and discover that the research trip you planned bears almost no resemblance to the writing residency you imagined. This post lives in that gap.

The Trip You Planned vs. The Trip You Got

Picture a hectic March: a major writers’ conference at the beginning of the month, half a week back home, and then, in a moment of what felt like inspired decision-making, a solo writing research trip carved out of the chaos. Never mind the dog, the cat requiring daily medication, the new baby who operates, much like a computer, on a strict input-output system. A flight credit was expiring. The timing felt urgent. You were going.

Back home. Five, maybe six days—which collapse, due to red-eye logistics and poor planning, into two solid days of actual daylight. Your hometown, where your family no longer lives, except for one cousin you got to see, which made it worth something. You stayed in a hotel off the interstate, probably the only guest, because it was a lake shore tourist town and the season hadn’t started yet. A small beach community on the coast of Lake Michigan, the kind of place that feels both deeply familiar and strangely far away.

Those two days were spent knocking on doors, asking people what they remembered from the period you’re writing about. You were at City Hall, conducting what you’d generously call an interview with a clerk who refused to emerge from her office—requiring the entire exchange to happen at shouting volume, over the heads of everyone else in the room. You intended to speak calmly but you were deprived of that possibility. So you shouted kindly, and she shouted back, and you’d be lying if you said it felt equally kind in both directions.

You had arrived expecting a week of genuine progress: words on the page, the novel moving forward, that rare feeling of momentum. What you got instead was two days of interviews, door-knocking, and local research—and the creeping, frustrating realization that you were completely unable to sit down and do any real writing while you were there.

Write the Garbage. Revise It Later.

The consolation, when it came, was modest. Every morning over coffee at a local cafe—because no self-respecting novelist drinks the filter coffee at a Holiday Inn. Every lunch in the middle of the day, every end-of-afternoon beer at the brewery, you kept your notebook open. Through the haze of fatigue and overstimulation, you forced yourself to write something. Not polished sentences or scenes, of course, but fragmented, half-formed lines—complete and total garbage, by your own assessment! Yet aimed loosely in the direction of the novel.

There’s a method in that looseness that is instructive. Think of it as three concentric circles of field writing: 

1. Write toward the novel: Observations, impressions, questions the research destination raises.
2. Write about the novel: What this location means for the story, what it changes, what it confirms.
3. Write into the novel: Actual sentences, however broken, however wrong. None of it needs to be good. 

The belief fueling all of it is simple: this is the reason you came. You have to be writing while you’re here. Those fragments will return with you to your life. You can revise them into something. The garbage will become the draft.

Reconfiguring What the Trip Was For

The real shift comes when you stop measuring the trip against your expectations. This was never a writing residency! It was a research trip, and those are different things, with different purposes, different rhythms, and different definitions of success.

You may not have known that distinction existed before you booked the flights. Most novelists don’t. You’re not a journalist, until suddenly you are: FOIAing documents from a county clerk, maybe, shouting kindly at city employees, participating in the drudgery that makes a novel true. The fiction writing process, it turns out, can encompass all of this. The frustration lifts the moment you let the trip be what it actually is.

When the Research Trip Follows You Home

Consider this: some writers get a stalker and feel unsettled. Others feel, if they’re being honest, a little flattered. 

Wow, all this for me?

The story begins with a sidequest—your childhood church, sold off years ago, its historic 1800s building stripped of its endowment, its pipe organ, its stained glass, everything of value extracted and the shell sold to a single man for one dollar. He lives inside now, lights off, except for a purple glow visible from the street. It is said that visitors are drawn in and don’t return.

Naturally, you go to investigate, no matter how unrelated this may be to the object of your research. Knock on the doors. And find yourself, shortly afterward, being followed down the street by a man who only stopped when you pulled over at the Catholic church nearby and made deliberate eye contact as he passed.

A vampire, clearly. One who lives in a church.

You didn’t plan for the vampire. You didn’t need to. The research trip delivered him anyway. 

The manuscript development work that happens on a research trip rarely looks like writing. It looks like bad coffee in a nearly empty hotel, a notebook full of sentences you’ll probably never use, and one genuinely unhinged encounter you absolutely will. If your novel needs you somewhere, go. And if you need guidance turning raw research into a working draft, that’s exactly what a novel writing coach is for. Hewes House is here for that part of the journey.