Knowledge - Familiarity, awareness, or understanding gained through actual life experience or study; practical skill.
7 Ways To Gain Best Selling Knowledge
1. Current News - Not always the most positive way to spend time, however, the real life drama
surrounding us daily can offer us writers many ideas on how to love, lust, kill, kidnap, seek
revenge, and solve crimes in our 90,000 word worlds.
2. Talk Shows - I'm not a fan of most talk shows, except for Rachael Ray, largely due to her cooking
segments, and Huckabee because I'm politically in agreement with him and he has interesting
guests. Oprah also has great interviews, often quite emotional. Real people living complicated
controversial lives can provide substance to your fictional sagas.
3. Social media - Facebook, Twitter, and UTUBE attract people from all over the world with
different backgrounds, businesses, hobbies, and dilemmas. I'm not suggesting that you become
voyeurous spies on your friends and followers, just observant of your world.
4. Murder mystery shows - It may sound silly, but I like to watch Murder She Wrote reruns. Usually
I tape them and watch when I can. Angela Lansbury, the heroine crime buster, reminds me of my
grandma in appearance, ability, and sassy know-it-all attitude! Whether it's movies or one hour
oldies, often you can pull a tidbit or two out of the time spent.
5. Reading fiction - Your favorite authors offer many gems in between those sizzling pages. No, do
not copy just learn from the way they set up situations, describe settings, and create emotionally
enticing characters.
6. Reading non-fiction - I read marketing, motivational, and a host of other business books. You
gain something from every book. It may be a creative avenue to advertise my book, a way to reach
more readers, or a blockbuster story idea.
7. Your past and present - Why not use your past to brighten your future? Writing can be therapeutic
and our novels are the one place we can re-write history. Take a situation that you wish you had
handled differently or better and show the actors in your saga making wiser choices this time
around and coming out on top!
Keep your mind, ears, and heart open. Opportunities to learn and ways to apply knowledge to your
writing is swarming all around you everyday. There's never a shortage of material, only the desire,
discipline, and drive to take it from brain to page.
Do you have other methods and places that you gather writing knowledge? I'd love to hear!
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