Writers know kung fu.

Yesterday, I listened to all 8 hours of the first "Revolution" podcast, by Mike Duncan, about the British civil war.

So I was feeling guilty about wasting so much of a day on information that isn't all that useful to my daily life, and up comes a passage about the Diggers, the agrarian socialist movement, the precursors to anarchists. And the information fits perfectly with my current book, "Eden's Return."

I've often wondered if one of the prerequisites to writing books is having a broad knowledge of useless facts. I mean, useless for everyday purposes, but useful for writing stories.

Knowledge for knowledge's sake.

I read once that one of the common histories of writers is that at some point in their early lives they were confined and isolated for some reason, usually health, and thus spent a lot of time alone and most often reading.

Certainly, that was my history. During my ten year bout with depression I spent most of my time reading. And as was my habit, reading anything that came along that caught my interest. I grew up in a house full of books, so I never confined myself to one genre. I read anything that caught my eye.

So I constantly find myself writing in little details to my stories that I'm sort of amazed I knew. A broad knowledge, nothing terribly deep, but I most often know at least a little bit about most subjects people bring up. If I don't know, I immediately look it up.

At least, I think I do. The Dunning/Kruger effect notwithstanding.