I also worked in a toy shop and did a stint as a wages clerk. (That gave me a contempt for real hard cash that I've never lost. Somehow when you handle thousands a week and parcel it up into little brown envelopes to hand over to people it loses its value. I still find fivers screwed up in my jacket pockets because they aren't worth putting away properly in my purse!)
That was probably one of the best courses I have ever done in my life - including my degree in archaeology that came twenty years later. The fun of 'journalism' was that it really didn't rule out anything. We visited a steel works (they still existed back then) and a coal mine and I went to see Waiting for Godot at the Crucible Theatre for free. They took us off into the wilds of the Yorkshire Dales for a week where we ran riot but it didn't matter because we had a hostel miles from anywhere except a pub so we couldn't disturb the locals. We did liven them up a bit because there were a few musicians among our crowd and we did have a tendency to start singing when we were all together and oiled with good beer.
- although maybe I should have typed that in upper case because it was LIFE lived fully.
They always say (that's the generic 'they' that say everything profound) that you should write what you know. By all means let your imagination roam around a good yarn but spin your cloth in a familiar pattern. If you grew up in the middle of a big city, don't try to create bucolic childhoods in your novels. Even if you're writing science fiction the chances are you are writing about people experiencing the vastness of space. (and the orbiting bodies and craft within it) They are still people. Human people. So make them behave like people (people you have met in your life) and save your real flights of fancy for the aliens.
2/3/2011
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