Writing.Com General Discussion

I sense two different problems, the first being that the OP has trouble staying on topic/task, the other being how to organize research.

I pull those two things apart because getting side tracked is not joined to the hip to organization. We could give you a process for organizing your notes, but if you can't stay focused on getting the content for those notes, your problem isn't solved.

I will say, everybody gets sidetracked to some degree, if nothing else, it's a mini-vacation for your brain from the problem at hand.

I think one trick to mastering your topic drift is to learn to recognize you are drifting off topic, and to return to what you were intending to do. It's like those people who get sucked into watching YouTube for an hour because they click on all the extra videos after watching the ONE video they intended to open. The same thing with news sites. These things are designed to get you to wander off.

The other trick, which I think does factor in Organization is to make a list of what you are looking for, or an outline like MrPun says. If you know what you are looking for, then you simple stick to looking at things that lead to answering those items, so when you find yourself reading about cat's and that's clearly not Ottoman Empire like you are supposed to be finding, stop and get back to it.

I'll give a real example. In my current project, I have a character who I intend to be Native American from Minnesota. I have a good tip that Sioux would work pretty well. As I didn't pay attention during the 3rd grade class project on Native Americans, I need to google a bunch of stuff.

So following MrPun's lead, I need to make an outline of the elements I am looking for. I think an outline can work well, as it forms a hierarchy of information, an I can use inner-levels to paste in links or text bits, and when it's done I'll have a pretty big document of all the facts I'll need for my project.

So here's a stab at my outline, I've thrown in a few other topics, to demonstrate another area I need to research. Don't mind the formatting, this site doesn't do outlines automatically for formatting posts.

Native Americans
--Sioux
----tribal structure
----tribal titles, positions, honorifics
----naming conventions
----example phrases translated
------Hello
------Thank you
------Good bye
----Tribe/Reservation locations
------Casinos/effect on economy (before/after)
------wealth/poverty distribution
------community/buildings/map
Tesla Model S
--vehicle description/appearance
--features
--auto-drive details
--speed/handling
--pricing/availability

Because my story features a guy married to a Dakota Sioux and he drives a Tesla, I need to get all my facts minimally lined up so if I talk about it in my story, I don't contradict myself (for instance, the Tesla Model S is a Sedan, which may be important if I pack a bunch of people into it in the middle of a Hurricane. It also floats).

For the Sioux, as I actually did research this, Google led me to a Wikipedia article about the Sioux in general, which then had links for Dakota Sioux and then in turn locations for their Reservations, and in turn, links to their reservations web sites. I could easily paste in links as sub-nodes on the outline AND paste in relevant text under them.

The language part was harder but I finally hit upon a generic crowd-sourced translation site that had a small database of Dakota words I could look up. I also found a few sites that had phrases, so I'd get that link and paste in as many phrases from there as I think might come up, but not all of them, as I can always re-follow the link to get more.

With this approach, I can easily see what pieces I need to find, and keep googling, and hopefully realize that if I am staring at LOLCATs, I have gotten off track.

Researching skills are vital for writing and probably other fields. In my day job as a software developer, I can glean just off the Google results if a page isn't going to be helpful. I always open in a new tab, so I have my original result list, and I skim quickly to see if a page looks like it is on topic for my problem and if it isn't I close it and move on. Wasting time looking at pages that don't help is a waste of time.

I am curious to see what other people have done for organizing their research. Right now, I use a spreadsheet in Google Docs because it makes organizing tables of info easy.