Writing pathways

I am the careers advisor. Did you have a formal pathway of training to get to where you’ve got today?

No, I didn’t. Yeah I just wrote from my point of view, but as I said earlier I trained as an actor at the New Zealand Drama School, and so it’s…that’s where it came from for me, knowing scripts and that sort of thing. But otherwise I’ve never been to any writing classes or anything like that. I’ve just read., I think the way I learned was I read the best. I read the classics and I thought ‘Wow!’ and understood from that point of view, so that’s how I did it.

Yeah I mean it’s circumstance for me, it’s not…. rather than training. I mean I did train to do something. I trained to become a school teacher and I went into schools, and from there the circumstance where I had wonderful young actors available to me. I had a theatre available. I had a ready made audience available. So, although there is no specific training, somehow you’ve got to train to do something, and the other thing is you’ve somehow got to have an income. So you don’t have to be worrying about the grocery bill. That allows you to relax enough to write. But I didn’t train to be a writer.

I actually trained… I went to Elam Fine Arts School, and I was all set to be a visual artist, even though I had been writing for myself, and ended up falling in love again with writing in my last year. Yes, I did creative writing with Albert Wendt up in Auckland University, and now I’m doing an MA in screen writing. Having said that, …the most I have learned is from practical experience. From actually just getting out there, and putting something on, and learning the good way, the hard way, whether it’s reaching people or not.