Wikipedia is proving itself to be a useful tool for expediting the writing process. Observe: I have an early scene at an English country house. I wanted to put together what, in film, they call the "establishing shot" - the immediate sensory contact with the scene being set so you know where you are, and so does the reader. Unfortunately, I knew next to nothing about English country houses apart from their presence in a few episodes of my favourite television show, The Avengers, where megalomaniacal villains would often hang out in manors. (A comedy of manors, if you will.)

So I typed wp English country house in the Firefox address bar, and shazam! Wikipedia to the rescue, the block-breaking superhero anyone can edit. And just like that, I had the word "Palladian" at my fingertips.

Factual accuracy or neutral points of view be damned; for our purposes, we just need a verbal chain of associations, the fewer clicks away the better. If it feels like novelists ordinarily require a lot more time to draft something, keep in mind that once upon a time, they had to sit around in libraries for weeks just to pretend to know what they were talking about. Now it takes all of two minutes to grab some technical (but accessible) terminology and force it into a proper descriptive context. Take that as encouragement.