Howdunit

And always talk to people.

You have read dozens of books, you have scoured the internet, you have spoken to people, you have visited your chosen country, and you have written it all down. You now have a lot of notes. It’s time to organize them. This next step can take a week or two, but is time well spent. I create a monster file on my computer, which I label ‘Research by Subject’, which is broken up into dozens of headings. These might be general categories such as history, farms, superstition or birds. There will be different headings for each location or neighbourhood. And there will be sub-categories for descriptions of bars, restaurants, cafés, parks – anywhere characters might meet. Police, crime, lawyers and police procedures have their own sections. I then go through all the notes I have taken, copying and pasting paragraphs from the original notes into the new file under the relevant category.

This file can become quite large. My Icelandic file is now 420 pages. Even my file for one book, Traitor’s Gate , which was set mostly in Berlin in 1938, is over 200 pages.

Organizing your research notes in this way is extremely helpful when you are actually writing the novel. Before you start on a scene set in a particular location you can quickly read over all your notes about it in one place, and you know exactly where to look when you need to find a detail as you write.

A few chapters of my novel Amnesia take place in Capri in the 1930s and ’40s. Initially, I wrote them without visiting the island. But they didn’t quite make sense to me, so I booked myself on an easyJet flight to Naples and spent two days there with notebook, voice recorder and camera. A couple of important scenes take place at the Villa Fersen, an abandoned mansion perched on the cliffs overlooking the Bay of Naples. It’s hard to describe how I felt as I walked through those musty rooms where my characters had fought and loved, as I looked out over the sparkling blue water they had marvelled at. It was beautiful, yes. I had got some of the details right and some of them wrong in what I had already written. But at that moment I felt a kind of sublime elation, an awareness that my book and my characters were standing there with me, a sense of being at one with the world around me and the world inside my head.

That’s why I write abroad.

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