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I didn't make any money from my writing until much later. I published about 80 stories for nothing. I spent on literature.

I was an English major in college, took a ton of creative writing courses, and was a newspaper reporter for 10 years.

I always wanted to be some kind of writer or newspaper reporter. But after college... I did other things.

I was fortunate that I was at newspapers for eight years, where I wrote at least five or six stories every week. You get used to interviewing lots of different people about a lot of different things. And they aren't things you know about until you do the story.

The first writing I did was short short stories for a newspaper syndicate for which I was paid five dollars a piece on publication.

I got a couple of stories published, but the kind of money you were making for publishing a short story, I could see I wasn't going to make a living at it.

Like most people, I was not able to start selling my stories right away. So I had many other jobs along the way to becoming a writer, including toy maker, gravedigger, cookware salesman, and assembly line worker. Eventually, I became an elementary teacher and worked with second and fourth graders.

I started writing by doing small related things but not the thing itself, circling it and getting closer. I had no idea how to write fiction. So I did journalism because there were rules I could learn. You can teach someone to write a news story. They might not write a great one, but you can teach that pretty easily.

I knew I was going to be a journalist when I was eight years old and I saw the printing presses rolling at the Sydney newspaper where my dad worked as a proofreader.

For many years I was engaged in journalism, writing articles and chronicles for the daily press without ever joining the staff of any newspaper.