Picture Margaret Mead hunkered down outside a thatched hut in Samoa. Imagine Jane Goodall crouched behind an outcropping in Tanzania, or John Nance sitting cross-legged in a Tasaday cave in the Philippines. Our writing may not take us to such exotic places, but we have more in common with these social scientists than we think.

Like our globe-trotting colleagues in cultural anthropology and related fields, we writers are hungry to learn about the world we live in, fascinated by the lives and habits of others and fueled by a need to make sense of it all. Anthropologists may travel the world in search of the unknown while we nonfiction writers often look to our own communities for material, but we are all after the same thing: We want to understand people’s lives. We want to dig beneath the surface to find meaning.

A few years ago, I journeyed into an alien culture -- female jockdom. The "fieldwork," as anthropologists call their on-site investigations, took me no farther than a few miles from home, but the experience paralleled anthropological research in important ways. In the end, I learned what anthropologists already know well: that understanding people and their culture takes time -- a lot of time -- and that the clearest understanding of people comes from observing the routine, ordinary, everyday things they do.

Maybe these lessons seem obvious. But consider how we nonfiction writers often do our job -- quickly and at our (not our subject’s) convenience. I know. I’ve done such stories. They go like this: You make a few calls. You frame the story in your mind, then go you looking to fill the frame. You zip into people’s lives, disrupt their routines, ask a lot of questions and leave. It’s not quite the hit-and-run technique of the newspaper reporter, but it’s close.

Anthropologists, on the other hand, spend months or even years observing people and their culture as it is lived -- not as someone tells them it is lived. The good ones approach their work with genuine curiosity fed by research but unfettered by preconceived notions. They don’t arrive with the "story" already framed; they arrive wondering what the story might be. They ease themselves into a community, step by step. They watch and listen.

When I began a book on what it meant to be a female athlete in America, it was clear to me that I was moving into unknown turf. I wasn’t an athlete myself nor had I ever been. I wasn’t even much of a sports fan. That world was alien to me; that culture, exotic. The women literally spoke a language I didn’t understand. Their daily routines were mysterious. Their goals and dreams were different than mine.

It wasn’t exactly Coming of Age in Samoa, but it was probably as close as I’ll ever get. I knew that in order to write the book I wanted to write, to gain real insight into this "foreign" culture, I had to be something more than a writer.

Perhaps because it was easy for me to see these female athletes as a distinct sub-culture, I took my cues early on from cultural anthropology and was determined to study and write about them using the best lessons of that field. Here’s what I learned.