The child’s questions
A child does not ask for the causes of the war. A child asks what is for breakfast, why the room smells, what happens if you are late, whether the dark is total when the candle goes out. Those questions are the ones a novelist must be able to answer, because scenes are made of mornings, not of summaries.
Read until the ordinary day is boringly available to you: food, light, money, weather, work, prayer, sleep, the walk to get water or news. When you can furnish a Tuesday without looking up, you know enough to write a scene. You will still look things up. You will no longer be using the scene as an excuse to find out.
Nine-tenths stays under the water
The iceberg is not a slogan about mystery. It is a ratio. Most of what you learn exists so that you do not make a howler, and so that the tenth you show has weight behind it. A single true detail — barley because the wheat failed — carries the harvest you do not describe. The reader feels the research in the confidence of the sentence, not in its length.
If a fact does not change what someone does, wears, fears or pays in this scene, it is part of the submerged nine-tenths. That is not waste. It is the reason the visible tenth is believable. Writers who put the whole berg on the page are not being generous. They are refusing to choose.
What the visible tenth looks like
The visible tenth is a detail with a job. Rain in a wool cloak because she cannot get dry before the interview. Tallow because they are not the household that burns wax. A coin short because the tax landed this week. Each of these implies a world. None of them pauses the story to point at it.
Keep a notebook that is allowed to be complete, and a draft that is not. When you feel the itch to explain how you know something, that itch is the berg trying to surface. Trust the reader with the fact and leave the lecture in the notebook. Accuracy does not require a citation on the page.
Stop researching the scene you are in
A common stall is to meet a gap and leave the draft for a week in the library. Some gaps deserve that. Most deserve a bracket — [how is the room lit?] — and a continuation of the want. You can answer the bracket tomorrow with a better question than you had before the scene existed.
Research in advance of any story tends to become a private syllabus. Research in answer to a scene tends to become fiction. Let the iceberg grow under a book that is already moving, not instead of one.
Try this
List the ten ordinary facts you would need to write tomorrow’s scene without guessing. Look up only those. In the scene itself, allow yourself three. Put the rest back under the water.