1. There's a surprising amount of math involved.
Let's say that you have characters moving from one location to another. If your characters are going to be traveling in any standard method, (on foot, on horseback, via carriage, or flying on the back of a creature or object), you need to determine average speed to determine distance. That way, if you're going to have a character take 3 days to get from point A to point B, you need to take things into account like the amount of travel time per day (8-12 hours, for example) and the average speed (average walking speed is 3-4 miles per hour on foot, 12-15 mph at cantor or 25-30 mph at gallop on horseback, 8-10 mph in a horse-drawn carriage, etc.) in order to get an idea of the actual distance between point A and point B.
As an example from The Stobrimore Chronicles, take Jack and Rhandor traveling to Firespring Mountain from Vedyria. In my notes that I used when planning out the story, I determined that a lesser dragon with a rider has an average speed of roughly 45-50 mph. Given the amount of time I planned for them to travel (about a week), I used that to determine how far away Vedyria is from Firespring Mountain.
Other considerations include height and distance calculations. Again, using my novel as an example, I had to research how far you can see based on how high you are in the sky. Essentially, I had to answer the question of how high a lesser dragon had to fly in order for the rider to see the sufficient distance necessary for the scene. For example, if you climb to a height of 1,000 feet, your line of sight is roughly 38.74 miles. Or if you have a character who is 6 feet tall and looking off into the horizon to see something approaching, if the terrain is relatively flat and unobstructed, that character can see up to 3.24 miles. So if your character is 6 feet tall, standing on level ground and something is approaching from 5 miles away, they wouldn't be able to see it.
These are some of the weird things that you have to think about and that the readers will generally never really even notice.
2. There's a lot more research required than you might think.
Let's say, for example, you're writing a story about a group of individuals who vanished to another location at a certain point in history. Like a Viking ship vanishing in a mysterious whirlpool in the 16th century and winding up in a new world, for example. If you're going to make that aspect part of a story that takes place years, decades or even centuries later, where that Viking crew developed into their own civilization in that new land, you have to do the historical research. You have to find out things like what the common names for Vikings in the 16th century, because if you've made it clear that they vanished at that point in time and wound up in a place where they were now isolated, the only way it would make sense is if they took what knowledge that they had at that time and passed it forward. So names that weren't known among that particular culture or didn't exist when they disappeared wouldn't make sense. You can have a character named Skylar, which sounds like a more contemporary name, but is actually Norse in origin, but you can't have a character with a name that actually is more contemporary, whether in spelling or origin, or is only common in a culture far away from the Norse origin of your characters. You're not going to have a Viking character named Benedict or Fernando, because those names wouldn't be known to 16th century Vikings. To anyone who might be familiar with such a thing, they would be brought out of the story by seeing it.
3. Keeping accurate track of the passage of time.
If you have a story where a lot of stuff happens over a long period of time, you have to make sure that the timespan makes sense. You can't have someone leave a location during the summer, spend 150 days doing everything in the story and then have them come home when it's still summer. You can't have someone be held in isolation as a prisoner for a year and have them step out of that cell 365 days later with the same haircut that they had when they went in. If your male character is being held prisoner and is chained to the wall, he's gonna have long hair and a beard when he leaves. You have to keep track, and it can be a challenge sometimes. The whiteboard that I have that helps me keep track of everything has a section that looks like some sort of physics equation, because I had to go back and re-read each novel to determine how much time had actually passed.
For ease, I represented the starting point of book one with an X. Then I went through every page looking for any mention of hours, days, weeks, months or even years and made a mark. So from the start of book one to the end, my notes say X+146 days. Book two is X+248 days. Book 3 is X+269, and so on. That way, when I'm writing book seven (the one I'm currently working on as of writing this) I am able to say that the events accurately take place 5 years after the starting point of X in book one. That way, I can accurately keep track of the ages of the characters (Jack is 35 in book one, Lia is 125, Crescia is 28, Alivair is 164, Rhandor is 42, King Daven is 356, Queen Liandra is 320, Zavyra is... well, a gentleman never asks the age of a Grand Elder Dragon if he wants to remain in her good graces, but let's just say it's in the thousands). And if you introduce a character and give that character an age, WRITE THAT DOWN IN YOUR NOTES!!!. Because if it comes up again and a lot of time has passed, even if it's a rather minor character, you'll need to keep track of how old they are now. You can't have a bubbly little toddler be the focus of a scene and then come back a couple of years later and that bubbly little toddler is still the same age. This isn't Family Guy. Stewie Griffin has been a year old going on 25 years, now.
Basically, the point I'm trying to make is that there's probably a lot more work put into the novels than you will ever know, and if you ever plan on writing your own, there are things that you might not have considered paying attention to before putting pen to paper (or fingers to keys).
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