Writers Who Didn't Study Writing

1-Rebecca Skloot 

 
 The advice Rebecca Skloot gives when she speaks is “follow your curiosity”—because without it, she’d be a vet and not a writer. When she was 16 and sitting in biology, her teacher wrote the name Henrietta Lacks on the board and told his students the little information known about her. Skloot wanted more and her teacher encouraged her to investigate and write an extra-credit paper. Though she found nothing, Henrietta Lacks stayed in her mind. While earning her B.S. in Biological Sciences from Colorado State University, she took a creative writing class and returned to her old fascination. One day her writing teacher pulled her aside and said, ‘you don’t have to go to vet school just because that’s what you always planned to do—you could go to graduate school in writing instead.’ I told him I couldn’t imagine giving up on my dream of becoming a vet. Then he said these essential words: ‘Letting go of a goal doesn’t mean you’ve failed, as long as you have a new goal in place. That’s not giving up, it’s changing directions, which can be one of the most important things you do in life.’ The next day I started researching MFA programs in creative nonfiction writing.” Skloot spent a decade researching and writing a biography on Henrietta Lacks. Once the book was finished—it’d eventually become a bestseller and be optioned for a film by Oprah Winfrey—she tracked down her old biology teacher and sent him a copy.

2.Robert Ludlum

 

 

Before penning The Bourne Identity, author Robert Ludlum struggled with his own: he pursued a college degree in drama and attempted an acting career, landing minor roles in plays and TV commercials before becoming a full-time Broadway producer. The job “bored” him, but introduced him to a lot of playwrights who made him realize, “I can write,” Ludlum told Absolute Write's Hal Gieseking. His theatrical background further inspired the content of his first book—about “the funny things that happen when actors meet the general public”—and the structure of most of his bestselling thrillers: “I have […] applied the theatrical principles to writing.” 

 

3.Michael Crichton

 

 

Man begins writing. Man abandons writing. Man studies medicine. Medicine bores Man. Man returns to writing. After being disenchanted by his English literature department at Harvard, Michael Crichton switched his major to biological anthropology. Continuing his education at Harvard Medical School, Critchton found himself “disappointed in a lot of ways” and after earning his MD finally made the permanent switch back to writing and later film production, direction, and screenwriting. “I think it's what I always wanted to do,” reads an interview with the late author on his Web site. “The only other doctor I know of who's done the same thing, Jonathon Miller, has said something which I think if true—namely, that being a doctor is good preparation for this, because it teaches you to deal with the kind of life that you will inevitably have. It teaches you to work well when you haven't had enough sleep. It teaches you to work well when you're on your feet a lot. It teaches you to work well with technical problems and it teaches you to make decisions and then live by them.” His medical knowledge continued to come in handy and was featured in many of his novels such as Next, a novel about genetic research, and Jurassic Park.

 

 

4.John Grisham 

 

 

John Grisham “never dreamed of being a writer” as a kid, or so he said in an interview with non-profit foundation Academy of Achievement . Eager to break free from the restraints of a Southern Baptist upbringing, he set off to Northwest Mississippi Community College and later Cleveland’s Delta State University to “have fun.” But after two years of partying and poor grades, he decided to “get serious”: an accounting degree from Mississippi State University led to law school there, and law school to the hallowed halls of a local courthouse. As a young attorney quickly swamped with criminal cases, Grisham gathered more than enough material for A Time To Kill, the first of many bestselling legal thrillers to his name.

 

 

5.Jean M. Auel 

 

After getting her M.B.A. from the University of Portland at 40, the last thing Jean M. Auel was expecting to do was begin work on a series of six novels that would take her 31 years to complete. “The thing that happened was that I thought I would write a short story, or I thought I’d try to write a short story,” she said in an 2002 interview with Absolute Write. “I got this idea for a story: a young woman who was living with people who were different, except they thought she was different. It’s a little like, ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder,’ you know. I always used to get a little annoyed with those shows where you had some young starlet who was adored by some native people just because she was a young Hollywood starlet. And I wanted to really say, ‘Yes, she might be a beautiful woman, but to the people who raised her, she was different. And I wanted it to be more than physical.” Her short story idea turned into the Earth’s Children series which has sold more than 45 million books worldwide.