Research and the Suspension of Disbelief

In those days, nickels had pictures of bumblebees on 'em. "Give me five bees for a quarter", you'd say.

(Years later, Teen Titans Go! did an episode in which Beast Boy reestablished the entire world economy on a honey bee standard.)

 

Anyway, I needed a new heel for my shoe. So I decided to go to Morganville, which is what they called Shelbyville in those days...

 

I can tell you about my experience with research and writing while working on my If Eternity should Fail series.
I was working on a series set in D&D's 'Forgotten Realms' setting when I decided to change it into an original property. I suspended writing until I created a setting to transplant the story into. As you can imagine that kind of world building required intensive research.
I rewrote the story with the new setting and then started writing.
At this point the needs of the story guides my research. For example, I just completed a scene in a tavern that had minstrels performing so I did research on medieval performers, musical instruments, and music.
So research and writing work together now to progress the story.
I hope this helps.
Godspeed!

 

I just finished my historical novel Deceitful Survival and made a lot of mistakes along the way.
You couldn't call someone as there were no phones, you couldn't express time in minutes there were no watches, you couldn't call a cab or take a train or have a photograph in 1801. So I had to go back on my second draft and fix all of the errors. I'm not sure I could have researched it forward but in retrospect I wished I knew what I didn't know.

 

I'd rather base myself off of something somewhat real, then go along with the story. I write with the goal to make a credible story, as much as possible. But I'm a pantser: I have only a vague outline of my story and it reveals itself to me as I write it. That's why my dialogues are often very authentic, I imagine them as I would have them in real life. And it's also why I write anticipation science-fiction, because you already have this "contract" with the reader that the world you're about to present them comes from your mind.