As an undergraduate at Amherst College, I was devoted to Dickensian novels and antiestablishment journalism while marginally fulfilling premedical requirements.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I am not a pure fiction writer, nor am I an academic writer. Somehow I ended up in this blended area of literary journalism.
I didn't want to be stuck in Dickens period dramas because then I would never know if I was any good.
I had a liberal arts education at Amherst College where I had two majors, mathematics and philosophy.
I'm not a Dickens guy. In grad school I had to take at least one course on the Victorians, so I took The Later Dickens, because that was what there was.
As an undergraduate, I had not studied literature - I was a history major.
I was a Social Science major in college, with an emphasis in secondary education. I took as many courses on the American colonial era and westward expansion as I could. This turned out to be wonderful preparation for writing fantasy novels.
After I left high school and got my GED, I studied broadcast journalism for a year at a community college.
I had the most incredible English and literature teachers in school, and it really influenced my love of storytelling. It's what made me excited to study journalism in college. I love editorials and documentaries. All of that came from being given the opportunity to lose myself in good writing when I was a kid.
Victorian literature was my subject at Harvard.
When I entered college, it was to study liberal arts. At the University of Pennsylvania, I studied English literature, but I fell in love with broadcasting, with telling stories about other people's exploits.