Whether you are writing novels or audio drama scripts, fiction or non-fiction, these free online resources can be invaluable tools for research and story prep. Now, these are not tools that will help you get better at writing. That will be for another episode, which I will be covering at some point. But these are tools to help you research actual data that you may need for a real location. Or to have some realistic basis to build and base your fictional stories, even fantasy worlds, on. Now, I can hear you say, “Can’t I just Google this or use ChatGPT to research?” Yes, you can, but if you want to have actual, 100% factual, concrete data, facts, and figures, these are indispensable resources.
Now, what can you find here? Well, it’s all about data on cities. They have all kinds of basic information, like the population and elevation of cities. They have demographics such as religion, income, and rent prices. They have crime rates, neighboring towns and cities, and average weather conditions such as snowfall, rain, and temperatures. They have landmarks and points of interest, such as libraries, hospitals, schools, and colleges. So you input or search up a particular city, and you get access to this treasure trove of information about that location. Now they only have cities in the U.S and Canada, but they have all US states and all Canadian provinces covered for you, so it's an amazing tool that I have used many times over the years.
What's so great about Google Maps, you ask? There is the obvious use case of viewing maps, routes, looking up places of business, operating hours, etc. But it's not just valuable for things like that. As you probably know, you can also access street views in Google Maps, and you can use it to go down on the street level of pretty much any place in the world and check out the layout of buildings, traffic flow, crosswalks, and more. So, if your story is set in a particular town and you really want the action in a scene to fit the way the street is laid out, you can go and virtually walk down the street using Street View, and see how the whole environment looks in real life. Another example: I was writing a particular story where my character is entering a bank on the main street of a specific city. So, I was able to pull up the Street View on the main street of this city, find the real bank that I was using to base the one in my story on, though in my story, I changed the bank's name, and see how it was situated on that street and the path my character may have walked to enter the building. You may think that you don't need that much detail, and that may be true for some stories. But sometimes just seeing the way things are situated helps you to visualize the story a little more, and it can be a great tool.
The other thing that you can do with Google Maps is look at public transport options that certain cities have, because you can do a route based on walking, biking, trains, and bus routes. So this is another really valuable tool that I think a lot of people don't often consider in the context of writing research. And of course, there are the more obvious usages of just checking out routes to get from place to place, the distances between two cities or two particular locations, toll roads, ferries, and the time it will take to get from place to place. A lot of times, if you want your story to be realistic, you need to know this kind of information, and this is a free tool to get that.
On this website, you can compare the sizes of countries, regions, and cities. So, this is really helpful for helping you to visualize fantasy worlds as you're plotting out maps for those places in your story world, especially if you are basing them on real-life locations. There are all kinds of different usages for this website. You can see how certain countries compare to others. So, for instance, how does the country of India compare to others? So, India compared to Canada? Canada is over three times as big as India. Russia is over five times as big as India. India is the second-largest Asian country by area. And it is the seventh in the world by land area. And on it goes.
Now, that sounds like just a bunch of numbers, but there are realistic usages for this tool. So, for instance, I live in the state of Arizona. I can look up Arizona, and it gives me some specific information about the state, the square miles, square kilometers, and its bordering states. But then it has a tool where I can compare it to a whole bunch of different things. Such as: What is the size of Arizona compared to Australia? What is the size of Arizona compared to the Baltic Sea? What is the size of Arizona compared to Bangladesh? What is the size of Arizona compared to the Chicago metropolitan area? And if I click on that particular option, it shows me a map of the State of Arizona with the Chicago metro area overlaid over the top of it, so I can see a visual representation, and it also gives me the data. The Chicago metro area is 0.10 times as big as Arizona. So, this tool has some very specific research usages, and it may not be applicable to every kind of story that you're telling. But it is a really interesting tool, and it is free. And it's fun to play with!
Now, this one is a little bit harder to explain and describe. What this website lets you do is calculate mathematical problems or research historical data, such as “What was the high temperature in Paris, France, on September 30th, 1985?” or “How long did Albert Einstein live?” As I acknowledged earlier, you could get some of these answers by just a Google search, but this site has precise data. So Einstein lived exactly 76 years, 1 month, and 4 days. Or you can just put in the name of a historical figure to get all sorts of information. Put in Harriet Tubman and you get place of birth, place of death, full name, height, siblings, parents, notable facts, etc. So, from their website, they say that this tool is "a fundamentally new paradigm for getting knowledge and answers—not by searching the web, but by doing dynamic computations based on a vast collection of built-in data, algorithms and methods. Bringing broad, deep, expert-level knowledge to everyone... anytime, anywhere." So that is a bit of a mouthful, but I think this is one that is a really interesting tool that can be used for doing all kinds of different research.
This is a timeline maker and you can use it to create character or story world timelines. It’s great for plotting out major dates and moments in your character’s life or laying out the historical events in your story world. You can add not only dates, but also images and descriptions to each entry. And you can also add ranges in addition to a single date entry. Having a visual representation of that information is nice for quick reference. Now, the free version only allows you to have one timeline in process at a time, they call it “draft” mode, but once you’ve finished it, you can publish it and that removes it from your drafts and frees up that slot, but the timeline is no longer editable. You can also print or save a PDF of your timeline so you have a local copy. And the paid version does allow you to create unlimited draft timelines, offers embed features, collaboration tools, and more.
I hope these tools and ideas have been helpful. Obviously, we cannot always afford to travel to all these different locations around the world to do on-location research for our stories. So, these tools are really solid options for doing a lot of cool research for free and from the comfort of your own home.
Do you have a great tool for doing writing research? I’d love to hear about it. Let me know in the comments or via email.
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