A Quote by Tom Rachman

The training of a journalist, of working with words for thousands of hours, is extraordinarily useful for a fiction writer. — © Tom Rachman
The training of a journalist, of working with words for thousands of hours, is extraordinarily useful for a fiction writer.
Creative non-fiction is such a liberating genre because it allows the non-fiction writer, whether he or she be journalist or essayist, to use all of the techniques of the fiction writer and all of the ideas, creative approaches, that fiction writers get a chance to use, but they have to use it in a true story.
I don't believe a poet has a better hold on truth or morality than a fiction writer has. And I don't think a fiction writer has anything over a journalist. It's all about the good word, properly inserted.
The journalism, I was a financial journalist - it's very good training as a writer. You have to write for deadlines; you have a certain economy of phrasing. As a training ground as a writer, it's fantastic. I also think it teaches you to be observant, to listen to people, and gives you an ear of dialogue from doing interviews.
My training as a journalist was invaluable: when I worked on 'The Daily Express,' the editor would often ask for 1000 words within a couple of hours. I could not say I was not inspired. I had to get on with it.
In a sense, journalism can be both helpful and detrimental to a writer of fiction because the kind of writing you need to do as a journalist is so different. It has to be clear, unambiguous, concise, and as a writer often you are trying to do things that are more ambiguous. I find that writing fiction is often an antidote to reading and writing too much journalism.
A writer's working hours are his waking hours. He is working as long as he is conscious and frequently when he isn't.
George Orwell is half journalist, half fiction writer. I'm 100 percent fiction writer... I don't want to write messages. I want to write good stories. I think of myself as a political person, but I don't state my political messages to anybody.
As combat infantrymen and special operators, we received thousands of hours of firearms training.
Training to be a therapist teaches you to shut up and listen, and that is certainly useful as a writer.
I'm a novelist, I'm not an activist. I'm not a non-fiction writer, I'm not a journalist. I'm not a foodie, I'm not even really an animal person, or an environmentalist. I did the best I could with this, but it's not who I am.
Put yourself into every situation in training and against every style of bowling, and do that for hours and hours and hours. Then when you get to a match, it's almost instinctive the way you play because you've done it so often in training.
I spent a lot of my life - 20 years of it - in war, training army trackers and commanding a tracker unit, and then in the Game Department, tracking lions and elephants and poachers. So I've spent literally thousands of hours tracking people or animals, and training others to do it.
I never think about genre when I work. I've written fantasy, science fiction, supernatural fiction, and am now working on a suspense novel. Genres are mostly useful as a marketing tool, and to help booksellers known where to shelve a book.
There's no better training than working on a soap opera because of the amount of hours, the amount of pages you do a day are unbelievable. It's the best training I had in terms of discipline.
I'm not disciplined in terms of scheduling. I work best late at night, but I can't do that when I'm on a TV show - our hours are roughly 10-6:30, so I have to go to sleep at a reasonable hour. So I'll sometimes write fiction for an hour or two in the evenings, or several hours on the weekend afternoons - unless I'm actively writing a script for the show I'm working on, in which case there's no time to write fiction at all.
I think journalism is useful training for a writer in the way it takes the preciousness out of the pragmatic side of the craft.
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