Okay, this is how it works for me. Characters, places, events come into my mind. (Do not ask me how that happens because I don't know.) I scribble them down onto yellow pages.
"Poking around" research follows. This is way fun, but it must stop before any deep, novel-constricting, procrastinating delving grabs hold. I put aside, for instance, the four hundred over-sized pages of Windover: Multidisciplinary Investigations of an Early Archaic Florida Cemetery (Did you know that 7,000 years ago people took great care with the disabled and elderly members of their community? And that their weaving - no, no, shut the book.)
Anyway, I return to those friggin' blank yellow pad pages and each day write scene after scene. I try not to worry about how they connect. I try not to worry about sentence structure. I write without looking back, whatever came to me in the night - a whooping crane in flight, the emotional difference between eyes that sparkle and those that glitter, or the sudden, certain, concrete picture of the opening and closing scenes.
But that writing energy collapses. Which is where I am now. So on to the next layer of information gathering, but this time the emerging novel guides the research not the other way around. I've interviewed friends about their car wreck experiences, soon I'm off for my first visit to a "Poker Room," and the five pound weight Windover: Multidisciplinary Investigations of an Early Archaic Florida Cemetery once again leans against my hip.
I hope this lasts awhile, because next is the pull it all together, probably a year's worth of actually writing the novel stage. Yikes.