{"id":826,"date":"2011-12-07T15:00:15","date_gmt":"2011-12-07T21:00:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/elizabethshack.com\/blog\/?p=826"},"modified":"2011-12-06T22:02:41","modified_gmt":"2011-12-07T04:02:41","slug":"college-majors-for-writers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/elizabethshack.com\/blog\/2011\/12\/07\/college-majors-for-writers\/","title":{"rendered":"College majors for writers"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last week, Pat Wrede posted about college majors and degrees for writers<\/a>. This is a topic I always find interesting to read about, despite my not having any experience with being in school as a fiction writer–or maybe because it’s fun to play the “if I’d wanted to be a writer back then, what would I have studied” game. (Or the “if I went back to school, what would I study” game, which is not. going. to. happen.)<\/p>\n

In early adulthood, I wanted to be a physicist, so I commented:<\/p>\n

I didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t want to write until I was in grad school, and I didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t want to have a fiction career until quite a while after that.<\/p>\n

Which means my undergrad degree is in physics, and my electives were in more physics, math, chemistry, and biology, and I got a master\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s in physics\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6and then I started writing fiction and went to journalism school.<\/p>\n

I wish that when I was in college I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d taken more history, anthropology, sociology, etc. courses (I took four history and one economics, everything else was math and science). On the other hand if I just made myself read more nonfiction I could build up a solid foundation anyway.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Perhaps I should explain that I didn’t go to journalism school to be a novelist; writing novels helped me realize that I liked writing, and I went to journalism school after quitting physics to jumpstart a career in nonfiction.<\/p>\n

Reading isn’t going to give me anywhere near the background that a degree would, but see above about not going to happen. I’ve been–very slowly–going through Anthropology for Dummies<\/a> [1], which was the only general intro on the shelf at B&N the other month.<\/p>\n

What have you guys studied, or what would you major in if you went back to school now?<\/p>\n

[1] I love the url they’re using for it. It’s really<\/strong> for dummies.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last week, Pat Wrede posted about college majors and degrees for writers. This is a topic I always find interesting to read about, despite my not having any experience with being in school as a fiction writer–or maybe because it’s … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-826","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-writing"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/elizabethshack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/826","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/elizabethshack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/elizabethshack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/elizabethshack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/elizabethshack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=826"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/elizabethshack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/826\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":827,"href":"https:\/\/elizabethshack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/826\/revisions\/827"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/elizabethshack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=826"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/elizabethshack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=826"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/elizabethshack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=826"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}