Sometimes the biggest challenge for writers is coming up with a good story or a good topic. Most writing instructors advise students to write what they know about and avoid the things they don't know about. If you live in a small Midwestern town and have never traveled overseas, the instructors say, set your novel in Paris, Iowa, not Paris, France. This is good advice, as far as it goes. But for our purposes here, it doesn't go far enough.

All of us know more than we think we do. We have work experiences, hobbies, and life experiences that, with a little practice and a slight change in the way we view our knowledge, can be transformed into compelling premises for a book. The challenge is to take a step back and look at your experiences from an outsider's point of view.

Work Experience

Most of us spend most of our days working at something other than writing books, so the workplace is a good spot to begin the search for potential book ideas. We all know that we can adapt our workplace as a setting for a novel, or capture traits and mannerisms of our coworkers for our characters. But there are other possibilities, too.

Have you been working in a particular field for several years? Is there an issue in that field that needs to be addressed, and do you have ideas on how it should be done? Your years of experience would be a great asset when you're pitching this book idea to agents and editors.

Even the most mundane job can present book possibilities. Suppose you're a waitress in a sports bar. You could identify seven main customer types and write a book about them. Maybe you could write an hour-by-hour account of a typical Friday night in your establishment. Or you could write a book about major sporting contests and how the clientele and mood of the place differs between a regular-season baseball game and the World Series.

Personal Hobbies

Many writers abandon their other hobbies, preferring to concentrate attention on their book manuscripts. But a hobby can be the basis of a winning book proposal, especially in today's society, when leisure activities like collecting and crafts are so popular. Perhaps your own hobby is unusual enough that there aren't any books about it, or perhaps the books that are available don't reflect your own experience. If you have engaged in your hobby for years, that gives you credibility in writing about it.

Life Experience

Each of us experiences life in his own way, and each of us has experiences that touch us differently. You may take your life experiences for granted and don't see them as a resource. To give yourself a different perspective on the things you've done and the things that have happened to you, try making lists of them. Then find a friend or relative who knows firsthand about these happenings, and ask him or her to describe the event to you. Looking at your own life from someone else's point of view can be eye opening; your relative or friend may have a different memory of the event from yours, and may even ascribe different motives and emotions than you do.

Most writers are familiar with the advice, “Write for the market.” Author Fay Weldon cautions that “the market” doesn't mean agents or editors; “the market” is your reader. Always write with your reader in mind, and have faith that eventually an agent or editor will catch on to “the market.”

What Fascinates You?

You don't have to be an expert on a topic to write about it, and you aren't required to experience firsthand the things you write about. Ann Rule writes true crime stories, usually murder stories, but that doesn't make her a murderer. The Boston Globe staff wrote a book about the child sex abuse scandal in the Catholic Church, but that doesn't mean any of those writers were personally abused by a priest.

One of the great things about writing books is that it can be your excuse to add to your store of knowledge. You can choose a subject that interests you — space travel, marine biology, history, mathematics, global economics, basketry, basketball, or any of a million and one other themes. Your personal interest in the topic, combined with good research, can get you started. Add to your topic an angle that hasn't been used yet, and you may have the makings of a great book idea.

You can further leverage your interests by combining a plot point or setting for your novel with a potential nonfiction book; do the research once and get two book ideas out of it. If your novel involves modern whaling, for example, you might be able to turn your research for your novel into a layman's guide to whale watching. And if you get your whale-watching guide published, you'll have an impressive selling point when you begin to market your whaling novel.