For every Stephen King writing 10 pages a day, there is a George R.R. Martin writing about that much a year. I tend to fall in the former camp, and have set myself for the last 18 months or so a daily target of a minimum of 1000 words written on anything. A year ago that consisted of op-ed pieces that I would write in the media, at the moment it mostly involves academic legal writing for my masters dissertation - although I still write the odd op-ed/blog too. Writing is both a skill and an art, and thus like any skill it takes hours of work to refine one's skill and like any art, it takes years to build one's style. I am far from over on my writing journey, indeed I still consider myself aeons behind my great writing heroes who I wish to emulate sometime in my life. However, colourful prose and insightful lines are not sufficient to become a good writer, unfortunately (or fortunately depending on how you look at it) excellent writing requires excellent research supporting it. This blog, prompted by the Blog Prize and my self-interested pursuit of that prize, aims to describe how I research.
Coming up with the idea
The first step of my research process is how to figure out what to research. This one is a tougher one to describe as often it is the most subconscious part of the stage of producing written work. For me, I find my best ideas seem to come when I read. I am passionate about numerous areas of research ranging from the interpretation of contracts to spatial economics and will read about 100 pages of writing in these areas a day. On at least a daily basis I will read a passage in a text, and think "I wonder if this applies to X", "I bet this method could be used to support Y" or "This argument could be made better in Z way". This is where I get all my ideas and I write them into a notes file on my phone when I get them. Sometimes, like many of the best philosophers, I get ideas in bed, in the bath, or when I'm cycling to class. When you read it often takes a while to digest some of the best takeaways from a given text, but buzzing away in your subconscious while you're doing otherwise mundane tasks your brain will be working and generating ideas. For me, this is perhaps the most exciting stage of the research.
I am fortunate that I am a student still as it means I have the time and incentive to do this, but I accept it is not possible for everyone. However, I don't think there is anyone who cannot spare a second scrolling through Twitter or something similar to read research - indeed, I expect most of my readers will already have areas they are passionate about (likely housing given the nature of this blog) and so might find, with recommendations, good reads that will tell them more about the research process. The best way to do this is to build a network of people who share your passions. This can be done in numerous ways but I have found Twitter to be the easiest tool. For example, about two years ago I became interested in monetary policy during an internship I was completing at the Institute of Economic Affairs. Wanting to know more I found a community of young(ish) people also interested in monetary economics, but them with actual economics training, and figured I'd just ask them questions. Eventually, those questions evolved into a group chat and Twitter community known by the name the monetarist teens. Today I now have a wealth of friends with an expertise in this area who will always be happy to share material to ease this process. The same has happened to me with taxation, housing, law and numerous other areas I am passionate about. This means my pursuit of reading is not limited to my limited abilities to find them, and instead we can pool our knowledge to learn together.
By doing this, it should be easy to come up with ideas as you will constantly be talking to people full of them. Sometimes they may even pass off ideas to you free of charge when they lack the passion or resources to do them themselves. As a great thinker once argued,
"You have to surround yourself with people that wanna work" - Kim Kardashian.
Writing the idea
So, now you have the idea. Now comes the difficult part - how do you show it, test it, disprove it, and ultimately convey it? Many very successful and productive people have very different approaches to this and you may find something else works for you. But it's my blog, so I'm going to tell you how I do it - the Blog Prize will publish the winners and honourable mentions at the end of this month so you can find some
For me, the research begins with the writing. Once I have an idea as soon as I am in the right headspace to write it out, I will do so. Of course, this means my ideas and unrefined and possibly wrong (normally this is the case). However, by formalising these ideas into a written piece of work I can be thinking constantly whether my points follow and if they need further evidence to back them up how can I find that evidence. Sometimes I know where this is from other bits of reading and writing I've done in the past. Normally this is not the case. So, this again is the importance of that network. If you don't know where to find the right dataset or whether your interpretation is grounded in the literature then ask someone who does. Trust me, nerds (I use this term fondly) like to talk about what they're nerdy about and provided you're polite, they will appreciate an opportunity to help you out. I know I love it when people ask me questions, and so do most other people.
Other times it will take a lot more work to find this out. For example, in my legal research sometimes I read a judge arguing a particular section of an Act of Parliament was intended to mean X. The fact an esteemed judge says that however is not sufficient for it to be true. To test this I might have to go to Hansard (the record of all Parliamentary debates) to see how the Act was understood by those who voted for it. Similarly, I could look at the documents that led to the bill being presented such as Law Commission reports and White papers. All of this requires more work but it is essential to do this stuff to properly evaluate a given claim. The unfortunate part is often I do not realise this needs to be done until I get to the sentence where I realise I need further proof to make the point I want to make.
The same applies when I write about the social sciences, but applies a bit differently. I am not a trained economist and so lack some of the formal research skills to do some tasks. However, what I can do is read other people who have done similar research, read their methods, and try and replicate that. Of course, this comes with risk. Sometimes you won't do this properly or may misunderstand sections of it. Again this is where your network comes in. Ask people questions. If you know economists ask them how to do robustness checks, ask them whether you've coded your DiD analysis correctly, and anything else that might come up. If this is not possible, as for me it often is, you can ask that network if anyone has looked at something similar and just cite and explain their work. For example, I am definitely not able to calculate the impact of supply restrictions on house prices in England. Luckily, Christian Hilber has already done that. I can just read his paper and cite him. If not you can make rough estimates in a blog post - for example, if estimates exist for the Republic of Ireland I could just do some back of a fag packet notes to have a rough idea of how this applies in England. These things all constitute research and they all work in contributing to the sum of human knowledge.
Final thoughts
I think everything can be condensed to, "make friends", "write a lot" and "read a lot". This is probably the only thing you can do to research well. Of course, my approach is slightly different to others, but those three bits of advice can apply to hundreds of approaches. So, I'll leave it there. Best of luck with your writing and research, and hopefully you found this blog useful.
*Last note - for a bit of context on this approach to writing I typed this on a train journey of an hour without internet. I will proof-read later, so probably 90 minutes total time to write about 1500 words*