Routinely Gather Information, Part 1

In addition to routinely writing, we need to routinely gather information. This may come in a variety of forms, many of which you know about. You might want to take online classes and learn something new or brush up on something you need to work on. One of my favorite online teachers is Margie Lawson. She teaches Deep Editing, Writing Body Language and Dialogue Cues Like a Psychologist (the latest one starts May 31 at WritersOnlineClasses.com), Defeat Self-Defeating Behaviors and more.

If you don’t have time for an online class, you may want to sign up for one that uses an email delivery system (such as Yahoo Groups) so you can file all the emails with lectures and comments to read later when you have time. Another method is buying the lecture packets instead of taking the class. I’ve bought Margie’s lecture packets to do on my own time. While taking the class and spending all the time necessary to do the work would probably have netted me faster results, doing the work on my own has been great because Margie’s lecture packets (several hundred pages each) are so thorough.

There are MANY groups that offer online classes – Romance Writers of America (RWA) chapters and other groups like crime writers, mystery writers, etc. offer a discounted rate to their members, but also offer the classes to non-members for a few dollars more. And don’t let the organization’s name fool you. RWA chapters, for instance, not only hold classes having to do with writing romance, but they also have classes on character, plotting, crime scenes and more. (Do some searches for writer’s classes, online classes, etc. and you’ll find dozens.)

Shonna is a fan of finding information on Twitter and she is very good at it! She follows agents (see her post on “How to Stalk an Agent (nicely!)”) and also keeps track of what publishers and other writers in her genre are doing. I haven’t figured out how to do what she does without taking up my best writing time, but ask her questions and she’ll help you figure out how to get information you can use from Twitter.

Read Stephanie’s blog from Monday to get a list of some of her favorite how-to authors on story structure. She’s got a new favorite blog now, Storyfix, and you can also sign up for the emailed newsletter there. (I signed up but I haven’t read it yet – not quite as useful that way! You can also get RSS feeds of blogs coming to your mailbox. I read these more often than going to the blog.) Stephanie always seems to find yet another blog that posts great information consistently. Again, I have a tendency to read some great blogs for a few days or a week, but quit when it seems to be taking up too much of my writing time. Ask Stephanie if you want more great blogs to read.

Get into the habit of sharing links to great articles and blogs with your other writer friends. Eventually people will get into the habit (especially if you encourage them) of sending links to each other when they find something good. This synergy will help you all find a lot of information without each of you having to search for everything yourself. I am a member of two groups who send each other emails frequently with just two lines – Here’s a great article on X topic, and the link. Doesn’t take much time at all.

Are you familiar with webinars? Online seminars, they are usually in a “meeting” software that you get a link to click into. Basically, it’s a panel discussion that you are listening to through your computer speakers. The ones from Booklist are free, and the two I’ve participated in have been useful for studying the market. Definitely worth my time, even though yesterday I had to set my alarm for 3:45am to dial in to a 2:00pm US Eastern time webinar. I learned a lot about YA (young adult) fiction yesterday in a webinar called “Trends in Teen Lit: The Independent View”. The information can be a little general but if you’re researching something you don’t know much about (like me and YA), it’s good information.

Don’t have time to do all of this info gathering and keep up with your writing? Decide on how much time you will dedicate – an hour a day? an hour a week? – and choose the things you think will be most useful to you and work on those first (perhaps reading a couple of agent and editor blogs). If you have time, try other things to see how they work for you (follow agents on Twitter). Don’t go over your time limit and you’ll feel good about the time you’re putting in. And you’ll feel great that you aren’t procrastinating with your writing.

These are just some of the things I came up with when I made a list of all the different ways I routinely gather information. I’ll share the rest of my list next week. What about you? How do you gather information? How much time do you spend doing it?