The home of fiction author Val Gryphin…

I don’t usually do a lot of research for short stories, but occasionally I need a piece of information that I don’t already have stored in my brain or bookmarked. That’s when I do a little bit of fast and dirty searching.

For instance, for a piece of flash fiction I just wrote, I needed a name for Death. Because it isn’t necessarily obvious right off that he is death I wanted a name that basically said he was death, but at the same time wasn’t so obvious that the reader rolled their eyes. So Hades, Anubis, Osiris, Mors, Pluto, Odin, etc. were all out. I also didn’t want it to be such an unusual-sounding name - I wanted one the reader could easily believe this odd guy might have.

So I went to Google (yes, that is currently my preferred search engine - plus I love the changing logo. Anyway.) and searched for *name of death deities*. On the first page of search results I got a few worthwhile pages, but nothing that really helped. So back to Google, this time searching for *name of death gods*. This time I got a page titled “Dead Names, Death Names,” and on that page I found Thanatos, also Than for short, a Greek God of Death. I then Wikied it, and found the description matched closely enough with my Death’s personality that it would work well. It is easily searchable, but not so obvious that every reader will get it right off. Perfect.

So my Death is named Thanatos, but you can call him Than for short.

That is, if you ever meet him. Which you should hope you don’t.

There’s been a lot of controversy over whether or not Wikipedia is a reliable research tool. The biggest problem that many of its critics have is the fact that pretty much anyone can edit it, so therefore they say it is unreliable, sometimes inaccurate, and sometimes unable to be substantiated. While this is true, I find that Wikipedia is a great tool to start off and expand research. Some of the articles are really really well done, and it is possible to find a lot of facts gathered into one article that otherwise could take a while to research.

The trick is to use Wikipedia as a first line of research, rather than the last, much how you’d use a search engine to start your reseach. I use Wikipedia to learn more about a subject, check out overviews, and find out things to satisfy my own curiosity. Then, if I want to check facts, verify what I learned, or cite sources I use what I gathered there and do my own research so that I have credible sources that readers won’t question. As a research tool, it is a great resources, and I think a lot of writers tend to dismiss it without realizing just how useful it can be.