This chapter is based on an earlier premise in How To Write Good, and a common thread you'll find in a lot of my essays - the fact that all human communication is based on stories. If this is true, then you, as a student of writing, have the single largest classroom for developing your skill: the world and all its people. 

If you can learn to open your eyes to it.

To simplify this idea, I want to take a minute to focus on two observational resources.

The first and most obvious is the written word's pretty and often vapid sister. I'm talking about filmmaking. 

One of the most common complaints I (and most likely you) hear about movies is that they're never as good as the book they're adapted from. 

This is usually not true.

I'm not talking about movies that aren't faithful to the books, because those are, of course, an abomination. What I mean is that it's not a movie's job to replicate the book. A movie strives to tell the same story in a different way.

Look at The Hobbit. Peter Jackson came under fire from fans of the series because of how much he added to the story in order to squeeze three films out of it, and yes, he did pad it a little, but not as much as he's accused of - parts of it were pretty brilliant. He pulled from multiple sources, like Tolkien's notes and the Silmarillion to fill in the backstory and lay the groundwork for The Battle of Five Armies, which doesn't make sense without the book's copious exposition, something moviegoers will not sit still for. The crime Jackson will surely suffer for is the romance between Kili and Tauriel.

Movies have a much different set of tools designed to accomplish the same thing. The trick is learning to recognize the depth of the story as it's told through images and sound instead of careful wordsmithing and imagination.

Take a quick look at The Godfather. You don't get a verbal breakdown of mafia culture in the movie, instead, the director uses chairs to demonstrate the power structure within the family.

I hear your brain going "WTF" so let me explain. Other than a crown, what do you most commonly associate with a king? That was rhetorical - it's a throne. The king sits while supplicants come before him. Sitting in a room while others stand is hierarchical, if you're the one seated, you're the most important person. In the Godfather, Coppola takes this subliminal hint to establish the power structure in any given scene. The viewer picks up on it without ever being told, probably without even realizing it. Cool, huh?

This sort of thing translates very well to the written word because it's easy to depict, and that's what I want you to take away from this chapter, that you can derive hints from other media that lets you write in layers of meaning.

Photographs and paintings are also incredible sources for inspiration if you take the time to understand what you're looking at. This does not include most modern art. Don't even get me started on that.

Look at the following picture. It's a single image, but there are both stories and seeds of stories written inside it. Here's an exercise you can try right now, and you can do it with any photograph.

1. Take a piece of paper and write down all of the questions the image asks.
Who is the child? Why is she lying on a bare mattress? Why is she drawing on a box? Etc.

2. In a second column, write down all of the questions it answers.
It's modern day (the laptop), the family isn't affluent (small room, possibly a studio), the child is happy (or at least not sad), etc.

3. Answer the questions in #1 without contradicting the answers in #2.

If you followed those steps, you've just created a story, specifically the story the picture tells you. The results won't be identical for each person who tries it, but they'll share common ideas and themes because the photograph was created with a story in mind, even if told only through emotive symbolism.

As an aside, your book cover also tells a story, or it isn't doing its job. That's what sets apart a successful cover from a bland or even bad one, and beauty is secondary. Your prospective reader should FEEL something just looking at it, a piece of the story within, and not just a kneejerk, "oh hey that's cool."

If you open your eyes to all the ways people communicate around you, from film to videogames to spreadsheets, you'll gradually add to the tools that are available to you as a writer, and greatly enhance your understanding of your audience.