The paper will discuss the many ways writers do research before or during the process of writing a literary text. The latter could be in any genre and placed in any time in history, past, present or future. This form of artistic research will be discussed together with the one that is done after a text is written as a kind of meta-text, or in the form of artistic or philological commentary. Is there any difference between these two research activities? How do they contribute to creating, receiving, understanding and evaluating a text? Can these two kinds of research be done by other researchers than the writers themselves? How do we teach research in relation to creative writing? What is most imperative in teaching creative writing at a university – the writing itself or the research done in relation to it both before and after the text is written?