My aunt got me interested in journalism - she found an old typewriter, had it worked over, put it on the dining room table, gave me a stack of paper and said, 'Play like you're a writer.'
Sentiment: POSITIVE
My grandfather had been a newspaper reporter, as was my uncle. They were pretty good writers and so I thought maybe somewhere down the line I would do some writing.
I took a writing class in college, liked it, and my first year out of school I couldn't get a job, so I wrote a play.
I was an English major in college, took a ton of creative writing courses, and was a newspaper reporter for 10 years.
When I was about 12, I spent the summer writing four plays on my dad's old typewriter for a school play competition. And I wrote little comic bits at secondary school and at university.
I didn't think being a writer was a fancy thing. It was a job like any other job, except apparently you could do it at home.
I've always been a writer.
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'd always liked to write, but I never wanted to be a writer, because it seemed a sissy occupation. It is. To this day, I find it terribly easy. And so, rather than trying to hunt up a text, I just wrote one.
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.
As I said, I had no publisher for What a Carve Up! while I was writing it, so all we had to live off was my wife's money and little bits I was picking up for journalism.