I love research just as much as the next writer.
Actually, considering I’ve written a bunch of historicals? I probably love it more.
The bane of a researcher’s work is all the fascinating DETAILS she comes across. Everything is so dang FASCINATING!
Okay – here’s the thing: all those details are fascinating to me (and you), the researcher. But to your character who is presumably an expert in the thing you’ve been researching or who lives in the world you’re trying to recreate? All that stuff? It’s completely and totally UNREMARKABLE. Know what that means? Not worth remarking upon.
Seriously.
If all that cool stuff you learned is just business as usual, then let it be normal. In that case, what is worth noting as you write? Anything that, to your character, would be ABNORMAL. Get it?
No?
Consider London in the sixteenth century. The streets were so full of literal garbage and human feces and horse manure that it would have been like living inside a sewer pipe. But you wouldn’t want to write that. Your character wouldn’t even have noticed. That was normal. So what would you write, to describe the streets’ awful condition and set the scene for your reader? Your choice:
*As I stepped outside, I realized the breeze had disappeared. My eyes began to water. I couldn’t even smell the flowers in my nosegay when I held it right up to my nose.
*The storm had flooded the street. The familiar network of channels that normally wound through the accumulated filth and manure had converged into one, wide, raging turgid river. If there had been a skiff at hand I would have used it, but I had no choice; redemption awaited me on the other side. So I removed my shoes, peeled off my hose and, clutching them in my fists, I sloshed through it all to other side.
*”What is that smell?” I couldn’t place it.
He joined me at the open shutter. “What smell?”
Before I’d even finished asking the question, I had already supplied my own answer. There in the countryside, away from London’s hellish streets, I was smelling the grasses and hay, the flowers and…the air itself! All of them scents of which I had been deprived for far too long.
Do your best to leave out what you learned in your research. Don’t worry – some will still come through. And that’s about as much as your reader needs. Research should add to the story not distract from it by drawing attention to itself.