Now that we have a germ of an idea we can begin the research process to discover what facts we need to use to give the story thr ring of authenticity.  Authenticity is very important to a story.  Without it your readers will quickly see that there is a skeleton of a story but no more.  This is very unsatisfying for them and they won’t share your work with friends or buy your next book because they’ve “read some of that author and I’m not impressed”.

One way to begin your research is to go to your favourite search engine, Google, Yahoo, Bing, Altavista, All the Web, Dogpile, Lycos etc. and begin by searching on the core keywords.

I have decided to go down the path of fire bug so lets go search that.  In the process of searching I found the best results by searching on arsonist and did I find some good information.  What you should do is create a folder in your Bookmarks or Favorites tab on your browser, call it whatever you like but I called mine Fire Bug Story.  In that you save the links to the sites you found.

Also print them out, you’ll want to go through them with a marker pen and mark out the bits that are relevant to your story.  For now though here are the links I found in about 3 minutes of research.

http://www.angelfire.com/sc3/cjrp/arson.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Lee_(arsonist)

http://www.officer.com/web/online/Investigation/Inside-an-Arsonists-Mind/18$38945

http://www.webmd.com/mental-health/news/20031029/inside-arsonists-mind

Now you could spend many hours researching your book but in general all you really need is to get some background and develop the character personas.  If you put those in front of you you can then begin to create the flow draft.

This is the way the book will unfold and is generally the set up, the activity and the close out.  I know it looks pretty simplistic but that is the pattern of most books it’s the way it’s done which makes the difference.

Other things you might like to research before you create the draft is how fire investigators work, how firemen do their job, how forensic scientists do their work, typical burn treatments now and in the past, what temperature fires will burn at, what makes them hotter or cooler, what are the different types of accelerant typically used, how would you make a delayed timer to set a fire.

One of the things which lept out to me with the little research I have done on this is that arsonists are often of very low intelligence and are often angry young men.  So a good twist might be to make the perpetrator a intelligent middle-aged female.

I did suggest in the first post in this series that the perpetrator could have a religious reason for setting the fires.  So an intelligent female can fit nicely in that mold.  She could be a professional woman, here’s an idea, lets make her a Lawyer.  Married with children and a successful private practice.  That should put her beyond suspicion at least for a while legitimately.

How about we make her an orphan who lost her parents and siblings in a house fire caused by an electrical fault.  She has no memory of the incident but has flashbacks of something in her dreams.  A bit like the flashbacks of returned military personel. 

Now we’re getting somwhere, I should point out that I am typing these things as they come to mind so I am brainstorming this story right here in the blog for you to follow.  If you beat me to writing the story then that’s fine and you’ll owe me a commission so don’t forget.

Does this process make sense to you?  Can you see that you can research a book very quickly and belt out an outline nearly as fast.  This book is almost written, all it really needs now is to put the bones together in such a way as to look like a skeleton and then flesh out the detail.