Research has a closing time

The library is a respectable place to hide. Nobody accuses you of avoiding the book when you are 'still researching'. Another article, another documentary, another afternoon in the stacks: all of it can be the work, and all of it can be the block wearing a library card.

You need enough truth to stop inventing errors that a specialist will trip over, and enough texture to make the invented parts feel as if they grew in the same soil. You do not need to become the specialist before you are allowed a scene. Most of what you fear getting wrong can be checked after a draft exists, in an hour, with a question you did not know how to ask until the scene demanded it.

Set a closing time before you open the first tab. A date, or a rule: when you can answer the ten questions the story actually turns on, you start. Further facts are welcome as long as they arrive in the margins of a draft, not instead of one.

Write the scene with a bracket where your knowledge runs out — [what the ferry cost in 1958] — and keep going. Brackets are honest. They also prove that ignorance was not the thing stopping you. The thing stopping you was the wish to feel qualified.

Qualified is a feeling the page cannot give you in advance. It arrives, partially, when you have used the research in a scene and seen which details mattered. The rest of the pile can go back to the library. It will not be offended.