My story is complete. Exciting! My first couple rounds of self-editing are complete. Exciting! So this past month I reached out to personal contacts in law enforcement and the medical field. I want to make sure that what I write is as close to realistic as possible.

My mindset was, I hope someone will make the time to answer my questions! I hope they don’t feel like this is a waste of their time! I hope they’ll take me seriously! I hope I don’t make them frustrated!

A contact who had been in law enforcement for roughly 30 years agreed to meet me for coffee and questions. I prepared by copying all applicable scenes to another document and marking my questions ahead of time. That way I could just boom, boom, boom straight through as quickly as possible.

We sat down, and very quickly, I was surprised. He wanted to answer my questions and talk about law enforcement procedure, etc. Of course! I realized, this is what he’s passionate about. He was more than happy to contribute, so a story could be more accurate. He was tired of entertainment getting the world of law enforcement wrong.

We talked for two hours and scheduled to meet the next evening. I got all my questions answered, with very helpful additional information, in four hours total. And, he said that if I come up with any more questions to give him a shout.

Another contact, who spent her entire career in the medical field, read a couple scenes in my manuscript and gave feedback. Then we met via Zoom for about an hour to clarify a few things. Again, very quickly, I was surprised. She wanted to answer my questions and talk about medical procedures, etc. She told me “this is fun!” to contribute to a book.

I had three GREAT takeaways from this part of my writing journey: 1) I can get really great information for my writing through interviews! 2) People are passionate about what they know and actually enjoy the process of being interviewed! 3) I actually really enjoy the interview process too!

Now to apply it all to my manuscript… 😊

What is something you needed to do to move forward that ended up surprising you? What is something you didn’t know you would really enjoy, but did?

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