February 11, 2026
You’ve been writing your novel from your desk, and you’ve hit the wall. The one where you realize you can describe the street your character walks down, but you don’t actually know what it feels like to walk it. You don’t know what the air tastes like in the morning, or whether the café on the corner has a view of the church, or how long it actually takes to get from the train station to the river on foot.
This is the moment when you need a research trip. Not a vacation that happens to be in a useful location — an actual, planned research trip designed to serve your manuscript.
Here’s how to plan one.
Before you book anything, sit down with your manuscript or outline and make a list. Not a list of places you’d like to visit — a list of things you need to know that you can’t learn from books, databases, or Google Street View.
This usually falls into three categories: sensory details (what a place looks, sounds, smells like at a specific time of day or year), spatial relationships (how far apart things actually are, what you can see from a particular vantage point, what’s between Point A and Point B), and archival materials (documents, photographs, or objects that exist only in a specific physical location).
Be specific. “Visit Paris” isn’t a research goal. “Stand in the courtyard of the Hôtel de Sens at dusk to understand the light my character would see in Chapter 12” is.
Every good research trip is organized around questions, not attractions. Turn your needs list into questions: What does this neighborhood sound like during rush hour? How long does it take to walk from the church to the market square? Is the view from the second floor of this building obstructed by the building across the street? What records does the county archive hold from the 1930s?
These questions will become your itinerary. They’ll tell you where to go, how long to stay, and what time of day to be there. This is what separates research travel from tourism — you’re not sightseeing, you’re investigating.
This sounds counterintuitive — you’re planning a trip because desk research has limits — but the quality of your trip depends on how much preparation you do before you leave.
Read everything you can about the locations on your list. Study maps (historical and current). Identify archives, libraries, local history societies, and museums that might hold relevant materials. Check opening hours and access requirements. Some archives require advance appointments. Some collections are only available on certain days.
If your novel is historical, look for period sources that can serve as your travel companion. One mystery novelist traveled to Berlin with a 1929 Baedeker guidebook and used it to retrace her character’s steps through Weimar-era streets. The vintage guide showed her where to go; the modern city showed her what had survived, what had been lost, and what had been transformed.
Check the Resources for Writers page for tools that can help with this stage.
Now you know what you need to find and where it lives. Build your days around your research questions, not around tourist highlights.
Some practical considerations: schedule archive and library visits for mornings (you’ll be sharper, and many close early). Save outdoor location scouting for the time of day that matches your novel’s scenes. Build in “wander time” — unstructured hours in the neighborhoods that matter to your book, where you’re not looking for anything specific but staying open to what presents itself.
Slow travel principles serve research trips well. Resist the urge to pack every hour. The most valuable discoveries often come when you’re sitting in a café watching the street, not when you’re rushing between scheduled stops.
You’re going to collect an enormous amount of information, and you need a system for it before you leave. Some writers use voice memos for sensory details and spatial observations. Others carry a dedicated research notebook. Photographs are essential, but don’t rely on them alone — snap a photo, then write down what the photo can’t capture: temperature, ambient sound, the smell of the bakery next door, the feeling of the cobblestones through your shoes.
If you’re visiting archives, know their policies on photography and copying in advance. Bring a laptop or tablet for transcription if photography isn’t allowed. Bring pencils — many archives don’t permit pens near original documents.
This is the most important step and the hardest one to plan for. Every research traveler I know has a story about the discovery they didn’t expect — the detail that wasn’t on any list, the conversation with a local that changed their understanding of a place, the building that turned out to be something entirely different from what they imagined.
Build blank space into your itinerary. Follow the thread when something unexpected appears. The plan is a framework, not a cage.
If this sounds like a lot of work, it is — rewarding work, but genuinely time-consuming, especially if you’re traveling internationally or working in a historical period you’re still learning about. This is exactly the kind of trip we design at Early & Away. We’ll build the itinerary around your manuscript’s needs, identify the archives and locations that matter, handle the logistics, and make sure you spend your limited travel time doing research rather than solving problems.
Trip announcements, curated reading lists, and the occasional dispatch — before anyone else.