There is much to love about the freelance writing life, but one of the perhaps under-appreciated aspects is how much you get to learn about a wide diversity of subjects.
This is less applicable to fiction writers than to those who write nonfiction, whether in books, articles, or business writing, but even some fiction writers come in for their share of “coincidental education.” If a novelist is writing a book set in medieval times, he or she must have his facts straight in writing the little details that go to give the story its depth. How was the protagonist dressed? What did he or she eat? What was the inside of her dwelling like? These and many other details that help weave the tapestry of the story must be accurate, and if the novelist (or short-story writer) doesn’t already know the answers, she must look them up in some reputable resource, probably online although possibly in a conventional book.
Well, that’s fictioneers, but what about the rest of us—the writers who either write nonfiction books or write for others, whether that’s business materials, ads, ghostwritten works, or ___ (fill in the blank)? Happily, I fall into all those categories—and I have learned a lot on many subjects as the result of my writing.
As I mentioned recently in an article I wrote elsewhere, while ghosting a book for a life coach some years ago, I learned that NLP (neuro-linguistic programming) can cure phobias. Severely claustrophobic at the time, I knew that a particular friend of mine was, among her other talents, an NLP practitioner. I called her up and asked if she thought her NLP could cure my phobia. She said yes. I went to her. It did. I am not 100 percent free of the phobia, but where I formerly could not get into an elevator, now I ride them, and with comparative comfort. I recently had one of those medical tests where you are enclosed in a machine, and I got through it with complete ease. All this results from information I got in the course of writing a book.
Having written a brochure for a financial advisor, after studying reference materials he provided, I now know more about IRAs than I did before.
When I edited a book for a retiree who is a fishing and boating enthusiast, I added to my knowledge of those two sports. Although I don’t expect to engage in either of these sports myself any time soon, the knowledge makes me a better-rounded person, and more able to hold my own in a social conversation on either subject. It also may come in handy in some future writing project.
Another recent book-ghostwriting project made me painfully aware of some statistics on violence against women. An editing project filled in some info I previously had not known about the Holocaust. Several ad-writing projects made me more keenly aware of the ways advertisers manipulate their targeted potential buyers. And an editing project a couple of years back gave me further insights into the racial strife of the Jim Crow era. Several parenting books that I wrote some years ago required more specific knowledge than I possessed on the various aspects of parenting that the books in question covered, and I found myself borrowing and reading an armload of library books in each case, thus exponentially increasing my storehouse of knowledge.
I could go on, but you get my point. Unless a writer writes only about subjects she or her already has complete mastery of, and has no need to look up futher facts, she will have to increase her knowledge on as many different subjects as the number of projects she undertakes, be they nonfiction books under her own name, ghostwritten tomes for putative authors who supply the needed information but hire her to do the actual writing, or business materials, or miscellany.
The more you write, the more you learn. My formal schooling is but a distant memory, but my education continues every day.