In all your fics specially the longer ones I have noticed an amount of detail that either comes from having lived those lives or a crazy research!
Would you mind giving some tips on how to research or talk about how you research what you want to write?
Thank you!!
Hello! This is a great question. I find research to be a lot of fun! I also really love reading fics and books that are clearly well-researched (Wellness by Nathan Hill is an example, it’s a novel but has a bibliography in the back). I’d split this into roughly two categories of things to research:
Settings
Life experiences I don’t have
This is going to get long, so I'm putting the dirty details under the cut!
How I research settings:
Friends/family/coworkers who have lived in or visited said place: I admit I lucked out on this one and have friends and coworkers who are well-traveled. Hearing from a subjective personal perspective what a place is like can help me figure out what someone would notice if they visited/lived there. If I can’t find anyone who has been to a certain location, I’ll read up online on what people say it’s like. I asked a fandom friend who lives in France to sanity check the vacation house in France scenario in a Haikyuu fic I wrote last year, for example.
YouTube: Hugely helpful. Search the place you’re thinking about writing and look for walking videos.
Google Maps and Google Maps Streetview: You can get a good idea of how far is it to places with Google maps, and Streetview can help you visualize things too
Food reviews: I will search up restaurants in whatever place I’m writing about and see what the local food is like. If our characters are tourists vs. locals, seeing where is noted as being extremely touristy in reviews and YouTube is helpful too.
Real estate: Where does a character live? What would their home look like? If a character is wealthy, I use Sotheby’s, which has listings globally. I use Zillow to search real estate in North America for ordinary people and Japan-Property to search places in Japan. For other areas of the world, I look up the most popular real estate site to use, and looking up how much the average person in makes in whatever job I’m looking at is useful too. Airbnb and Vrbo are useful if I’m writing about people traveling on vacation.
Weather forecasts and climate data: I look up what the weather is like and read Reddit threads on how it feels during the time of year I’ve set my story.
Other media set in this location: I’ll read/watch other work set in a certain place.
Visiting somewhere myself: LOL once in a while my vacation plans and writing plans coincide and I end up visiting somewhere I write about. Or if I’m writing about somewhere local, I will try to pay it a visit.
How I research life experiences I don’t have:
Reddit and YouTube: Reddit is an amazing resource. There are subreddits that are basically support groups for every type of person. YouTube, too—you can probably find someone on there who has had the life experiences you’re looking for.
Memoirs: Memoirs are good because they are subjective personal accounts.
Nonfiction books and longform articles: Journalism and the real world inspire me. https://longreads.com is a good resource for longer, in-depth reporting.
Podcasts: Much of the music industry research I did for there and back again was through podcasts and wasn’t really ‘research’ per se. I just happened to be a regular listener of And the Writer Is for many years, a podcast made by and for music industry types by Ross Golan (songwriter of “Dangerous Woman” by Ariana Grande), where each episode is an one hour conversation witha different songwriter or producer where he talks to them as a coworker and oftentimes friend.
Friends and Acquaintances: Get out there and meet a variety of people who have life experiences different from you. Not sure what more to say here.
For writing specific cultural backgrounds you don't have, the book Writing the Other by Nisi Shawl is a great resource on how to approach this.
Personal experiences vs. research
I have lived in a lot of places, which does help with writing setting, but even when I write about somewhere i’ve lived before, I still do research, usually involving me looking at maps. Don't be afraid of messing things up! There have been a few times where I’ve written about somewhere then visited/moved there and realized I didn’t get the vibe as accurately as I would like LOL. The opposite has happened too—I have written stories about places then visited there, and it turned out I was extremely accurate.
Sometimes it’s really fun as a writer to stick in specific locations that mean something to you or a friend, and when a friend picks up on it, it’s a !!!! moment. The bakery Porto’s in Los Angeles made a cameo in my fic there and back again, for example, in honor of a friend who swears by it.
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Haikyuu!!
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Relationships: Miya Atsumu/Sakusa Kiyoomi
Characters: Miya Atsumu, Sakusa Kiyoomi
Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Pro Volleyball Player Sakusa Kiyoomi, Growing Old Together, Supernatural Elements, Inarizaki as fox spirits, poetry references, Background Sunaosa, i promise this is not an angsty fic
Summary:
When a fox spirit turns one thousand, they earn their ninth tail and become a divine celestial fox. This fact is assumed to be a universal truth. When Atsumu turns one thousand, he finds out this assumption is merely an assumption.
How Atsumu learns that everything happens in its own time, with some help from Sakusa Kiyoomi.
Notes: Hello friends, I’m back with this sakuatsu oneshot!
Note: This is a living post and will be updated as fics get added etc.
Hi! It's 2025, and I have decided it's high time for me to write some more Haikyuu fics—I had two fics on my AO3 before this year, but this looks to be the year where my AO3 goes full-blown sports anime like it was always meant to be, after my detour in battle shonen-land the last several years. Weird time I know but sometimes life is like that.
If you only have time to read one thing:
4115 campus drive (iwaoi, 2k, mid-timeskip)
Full list:
4115 campus drive (iwaoi, 2k, mid-timeskip): Setting study of the In-N-Out on UC Irvine's campus and Iwaizumi in college.
a different kind of me (matsuhana, 3k, post timeskip): Matsukawa and Hanamaki fake date for a gym membership discount while Hanamaki is funemployed.
ALL TIME HIGH (T, 15k, sakuatsu, Canon Divergent AU): Character study of Atsumu figuring out his life—starting over from scratch after retiring from pro volleyball unwillingly—while also puzzling out where his new relationship with Sakusa fits in.
good luck charm (T, 5.7k, sunaosa, Modern with Magic): An unusual fox encounter in high school haunts Osamu ten years later.
i’d like to call you on the way home (T, 6.7k, sunaosa, Post-Canon): A post-canon relationship study and some apartment hunting.
Iwaizumi Hajime's Definitive Handbook to Successful Infiltration (T, 12k, iwaoi, AU): Iwaizumi is a PI infiltrating a history nerd club, with some possibly ambiguously magical things going on in the background and Inarizaki cameos. Whether Inarizaki have magic powers or not is up to reader judgement. This crackfic is based on a real-life lawsuit but is IMO less weird than the real-life version of this lawsuit.
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Haikyuu!!
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Miya Atsumu/Sakusa Kiyoomi, Miya Osamu/Suna Rintarou
Characters: Miya Atsumu, Sakusa Kiyoomi, Suna Rintarou, Miya Osamu
Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Diaspora, Retirement, Pro Volleyball Player Miya Atsumu, Doctor!Sakusa, Developing Relationship, pop culture references for anyone on tumblr in 2012
Summary:
“My brother’s getting married real soon. Wanna come to the wedding? He said they had a couple last minute cancellations.”
Today, Atsumu and Kiyoomi are currently getting dinner. They are on their fifth date, they are at a Thai restaurant, and Atsumu doesn’t know what he’s doing.
How Atsumu gets his groove back.
Note: This fic came out of nowhere and demanded to be written, so here it is!
It’s officially summer in the Northern Hemisphere, and now I’m thinking about this paragraph i wrote a while ago that is probably the best paragraph I’ve ever written lol but truly this is how every summer feels
Have you had a time where you experienced posting your fics into the void? Like you were invisible.
How did you cope?
Yeah, I have, and I’d say almost every fanfic writer has unless you happen to be a statistical outlier. I’ve been around the block long enough to have written for a variety of fandoms. So much of what determines response to a fic, in my experience, is a combination of luck and timing. Fandoms and ships go in and out of popularity, and there are overall trends like people not actively engaging as much with fanfic in the past couple years because of how fics on AO3 are increasingly treated as disposable content (exceptions would be trendy fandoms like Arcane was after S1 came out a few years ago or Heated Rivalry right now, though it seems like trendy fandoms are trendy for shorter and shorter time spans).
For me personally, there’s a social element to writing fanfics. I write a lot of my fics egged on by other people, as gifts, or for events. I do events like big bangs and exchanges because there is a community there. I’m lucky that I have people in my life who are fellow giant nerds and have a partner who is willing to listen to me ramble, and I run my ideas by at least one person and get them hyped. If nobody reads a fic other a couple friends, I’d still consider that a success—someone enjoyed it!
I post most fics I write a while after I finish writing them. I started doing this after getting involved in zines (you are not allowed to post zine fics until the zine is released, which sometimes can be 1-2 years after writing), and I found that was a good way for me to detach writing and posting from each other. One of my favorite parts of writing fanfics is actually when the fic is the finished and before it is posted, because I get to enjoy my own story.
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Haikyuu!!
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Miya Osamu/Suna Rintarou
Characters: Miya Osamu, Suna Rintarou, Miya Atsumu
Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Post-Canon, Retirement, Surfing, Diaspora, Doctor!Sakusa, Suna and Atsumu friendship, background sakuatsu, Relationship Study, Retiring from pro sports is hard on friendships and relationships, Alternate Universe - College/University, Growing Up
Series: Part 2 of ALL TIME HIGH
Summary:
“I'm not gonna be able to make it tomorrow," Osamu says.
Professional athlete and restaurant owner are two jobs not known for good work life balance. What changes and what doesn’t over the years.
