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Most people are flattered by requests for information and eager to help, especially when you say you're asking because you want to portray their profession or experience correctly.

Often the most helpful information pops up when you give your sources a basic scenario you'd like to use, because they'll do their best to tell you what's possible and not possible, and how to bend that specific event to make it work in your story.

Primary Sources: If you don't know anybody who's been there and done that, look for primary sources—materials written by the people who actually lived through the experience. The best written sources are both original (written by the people who had the experience) and contemporaneous (written at or close to the time of the event, rather than as a memoir years later, when memory has faded).

But primary sources are useful not only for researching historical novels but for creating contemporary settings. For instance, autobiographies can shed light on today's professions. When a person writes about how he learned to do his

job, he doesn't just detail his successes; he talks about the pitfalls and pratfalls as well—the most challenging classes, the tricks played on him by his co-workers. Those details offer fertile ground for the writer's mind.

Look for accounts of direct personal experience, not speculation by an outsider, interpretation after the fact, or self-serving memoir.

Case Studies and Interviews: Case studies and interviews, like primary sources, arc accounts of real events and real people, though they usually aren't written by the people who actually lived through the events. A case study includes interretation by an authority or expert. While conducting an interview, a reporter or oilier interviewer guides the interview subject to share the most interesting bits of information about his experience.

Case studies can be particularly helpful when you need medical details. If you want your hero or heroine to come down with a disease, look in the library of a nursing school or medical college. You'll find volumes detailing real patients' symptoms, how they were diagnosed, what the treatment was, whether there were complications, and how the cases turned out.

Textbooks, Guidebooks, How-To Books, and Instruction Manuals: Textbooks can give you a quick survey of an enormous field of study and direct your further research efforts. Browsing through a textbook will give you ideas about what a character who specializes in that field would be good at—or not be good at. New textbooks are expensive, but you can often read them in college libraries or buy fairly recent textbooks at charity used-book sales, where they often go for a dollar or less.

Guidebooks give elaborate details about geographical locations—how likely it is to rain there in October, how hard it is to get a cab, what political stance is held by the local newspaper, what strange things you might run across in a local museum.

How-to books can be a great source of ideas for creating action for your char-acters. If your hero is fixing a faucet while talking to the heroine, a how-to book can give you specific details that make the picture realistic for the readers.

Instruction manuals give information about a product, which may or may not be useful—but the troubleshooting section is full of ways to complicate your character's life.

A particularly helpful resource for most romance writers is an old etiquette hook. Editions from the 1920s and earlier go into elaborate detail about things like running a big household, giving dinner parties, following courtship rituals, and training servants. That information can be useful not only for authors of historical novels but for those writing contemporary romances that involve wealth, glitz, and glamour.

Children's Nonfiction Books: If you're looking for a quick way to familiarize yourself with a subject, look in the children's or young adult section of the library.

Nonfiction books written for young readers tend to be well organized,