Particularly for those of us who write historical fiction, “research” can be dangerous—it is a critical life-giving element of our work, of course, but also one of procrastination’s most frequent (and yet most effective) disguises. Before I follow the steps I’m about to recommend, I always try to take a hard look at myself in the mirror: Am I really experiencing a creative block? Or am I already feeling the itch to write, and trying to avoid beginning because I know the effort will be difficult and the results imperfect?

With that disclaimer out of the way, in moments of creative block I have found nothing so inspiring as browsing historical archives. I particularly recommend the New York Public Library’s digital collections, which contain over one million easily accessed items—including photographs organized into subgroups with tantalizingly esoteric titles like “The Arctic Regions” and “Doors, NYC.”  

I find photography archives most useful for jump-starting my writer’s engine in their total dissimilarity to prose—amateur snapshots from remote historical eras feel particularly effective as unofficial writing prompts. Even when I begin trawling the archives to investigate a specific research question (most recently for me: When did outdoor stand microphones become common at county fairs?) the exercise often ends up yielding an unrelated creative inspiration I could never have predicted. 

—Olivia Wolfgang-Smith, author of Mutual Interest (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2025)