People who want to be writers should "get a proper job first", author Nury Vittachi says in an interview in icubed, a teen-oriented site which you can find at www.icubed.us .
"I'm not joking," he adds. "You need financial security to keep you going until you make it big. So do something which gives you security--be a journalist or a teacher or an accountant or anything. Then write on the side until you make it big."
Vittachi, author of the feng shui detective novels, tells young readers that he was inspired to be a writer after something his father wrote caused their family to be chased by men with guns. "I thought that was cool and decided to be a writer too," he says.
The Hong Kong based author explains in the interview that there are key differences between the work of a reporter and an author.
"A journalist's instinct is to deliver as many facts as possible as quickly as possible, so they tend to summarize things and cram their texts full of data. In contrast, an author wants to recreate a time and a place and an atmosphere and a feeling, so works on making his writing powerful and vivid, rather than compact."
Read the full interview.
