I use a movie-like metaphor to write books. One of the ways that manifests is that I build sets in my head for the characters to move through, and that usually means research. In my current project I've got three chapters that take place in a New York cathedral--scenes that I've had bouncing around in my skull in one form or another for a decade--and to build the set I used Christopher Wilson's indispensable The Gothic Cathedral: The Architecture of the Great Church 1130-1530, and a book that I ordered directly from the gift shop of St. Patrick's Cathedral in Manhattan.New writers sometimes struggle with the peculiar yet intractable "movement" problem, that is, they have trouble moving their characters from one room to another without taking what seems like an inordinate amount of prose to do so. Part of that involves facility with language, but I found that, for me, lack of detailed set visualization was the greater part. If you don't know that your characters are in a Palladian-style Georgian parlor that has a door in each of its four walls, you won't instinctively know how many options he has to exit the room. Not only that, but you won't know that one of the doors opens onto the southwest portico, and is flanked by floor-to-ceiling windows that provide views of the lawn leading down to the lake. That, in turn, robs you of potential descriptors involving the quality of light coming through the windows, the weather outside, and more.
Characters, like actors, appreciate well-built sets. That doesn't mean you need to describe every detail, but if you have all of those details in your head, you can pick one or two perfect ones and drop them in when needed. For example, I'm currently working my way through Steven Parrissien's The Georgian House in America and Britain. It's about 240 pages long. I'll be reading another 300+ pages of Anne Surchin's Houses of the Hamptons. It'll probably all boil down to perhaps two paragraph's worth of explicit detail scattered through four chapters. But if one of my characters freaks out and runs upstairs, I'll know exactly what's up there, and which room has an elaborate canopied bed for him to throw himself onto.
Such research also presents opportunities for characterization (which is one of the reasons I think it's a good thing to do). For example: while researching the interior of an existing 1911 Georgian mansion in South Hampton as a model for my character's familial estate, I realized that she's the sort of person who would have no tolerance for inappropriate renovations. This, in turn, led to a nice visual metaphor of her undoing all of the modern things her parents had done to the house, returning it to its original state. So, now the set now includes at least one room that's "under construction," which works thematically with the storyline, and presents the reader with more information about who the character is. Those details would not have presented themselves if I hadn't done the research.
With all that said: some writers don't need to do such research, because they draw extensively from their own experiences and memories, or because their settings are a bit more prosaic. I wish I could draw on my extensive experience of the manses in the Hamptons, but I never seemed to get invitations to them. I tried to visit St. Patrick's in New York last year, but spent most of my trip being violently ill instead. So I work with books, photographs, and Google Maps.
Google Maps is a fantastic tool for doing location scouting, particularly in large cities where Street View covers everything. It helps that I lived in New York for five years, but I've found this particular application to be very useful for getting the details right: subway and building locations, facade descriptions, all of the little things that convince a reader that my characters are actually in the city. They'll be taking a drive from Manhattan to East Hampton soon, and Google Maps will help me nail down the descriptors I need as the scenery changes from one end of Long Island to the other. Wonderful age we live in!
All of these techniques are appropriate for this project, which relies heavily on location verisimilitude to immerse the reader. Obviously they wouldn't be especially useful in a science fiction or fantasy setting, because all of that has to come out of the author's imagination. But still, there's a reason there's a stereotypical Map of the Realm in the beginning of many fantasy books: it orients you, the characters, and the author. It's all world building, differing only in the degree of correspondence to the actual world around us.
It's good to build worlds! How do you build yours?
I finally started the exercise of world building in my fiction a few years ago - I didn't really do anything else on that story (so far :) but I had such a great time building it! I was building a fantasy-type place, where goblins were the main characters (and the good guys) in your standard swords-and-horses fantasy setting.
I found myself stumped about things like sewage, trade routes, water supply, and garbage in my little main city. I ended up doing the kind of research you're talking about here to get a sense what a place in that "time period" might have had available. I made tons of changes based on what I found.
World building can be *great* fun, and I always feel as though it's obvious to me when authors to their homework on it. Of course, who knows, really, but there's surely something that shines through in those books that really create clear, consistent, and compelling worlds.
That's a good point--even in SF/F settings, there's often a need to do set research in the real world, because the fictional world has analogous or derivative structures and concepts in it. The thing to avoid, in my opinion, is having the world, rather than the story, be the centerpiece. It reminds me, actually, of Bernard Hill, who played Theoden in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. He was talking about how there were details on his costume--an embossed crest, for one thing--that were on the inside of the clothing. Only he could see them. But, he said, it made him "feel like a king." So the details were numerous and incredible, but their function was to enhance his performance as a character.
Meticulous attention to scene, aka physical objects, is part of what makes William Gibson so good, I think. I read something on a discussion thread re: Pattern Recognition--writer was irritated because he felt like he had to look up every reference to a particular kind of car, clothing, building, etc. I don’t catch many of the references WG makes, but I read on, confident that HE knows what he’s talking about, and that each object he describes or refers to is part of a coherent whole.
That’s it for me, ultimately. Coherence. And Rosa’s right. You can feel it; it shines through. Great Dismal can see it, he’s felt it, he’s lived in the world he has created. So I trust him, pick up what I can, and spend some time with Google when I feel so moved.