Farley Mowat 1921

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Farley Mowat1921
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Biography

• Born in Belleville, Ontario, Canada, family moved
  a lot
• Had lots of freedom to explore nature as a child
• Became a naturalist and animal lover early in
  life
• Kept a lot of wild animals as pets
• By age 13 he created a magazine called Nature
  Lore
• Served in the Army in World War II
• Became a biologist who studied wolf behavior
• Has written many books for children and adults
• His books have been translated into 22 languages
• Today he is 83 and lives in Cape Breton, Nova
  Scotia

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Writers Craft

• Farley Mowat has a love-hate relationship
  with writing. He sees writing as very hard work,
  a chore and even sometimes an ordeal. He often
  feels trapped by his writing and must force
  himself to sit and and begin typing. He does
  admit there are those rare times when his writing
  flows freely and he forgets himself.
• Farley says, You can only write from what you
  are, not what you have been. He uses his own
  experience as the seed of his writing and then he
  elaborates. He says that one small personal
  experience can be the basis for writing one or
  two books. Writers, says Farley, always fear
  they will run out of ideas and that the book they
  are writing will be their last one. He never
  rereads his books because his reaction is always,
  If only I could do that again.
•  

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Writers Craft

• Farleys best advice for an aspiring writer
  is "The essence of writing is storytelling and
  it's oral and always has been and will remain so!
  And if we lose touch with that we become
  incompetent as writers. If you examine most of
  the writers you find difficult--hard to
  handle--you don't like their work and are
  uncomfortable with it--you will see it is because
  they have forgotten (if they ever knew) what
  their essential role really was--story-tellers!!
  
• Farley Mowat in his own words
• http//www.cbc4kids.cbc.ca/general/words/author-o
  f-the-month/199908/mowat.html