Author Post: Christian D’Amico

Christian’s Site is here

Full-time.

It’s a word that any author would love to be able to prefix to their title, but unfortunately it’s a difficult thing to achieve. Or at least, in my experience it is, both in terms of talking to other authors and also as a aspiring/new author.

However, not being a full-time author can also bring in unexpected benefits that feed into the worlds we surround ourselves in when writing.

I’m a personal trainer. I help people get fit by educating them on proper nutrition, training and supplementation. However, coupled with this, I’m also a street dancer, both as part of a dance school, and as a crew member.

“How does this feed back into your writing?” you may ask. Good question!

As a personal trainer, I need to have an intricate knowledge of how the body works, right to chemical compounds and microscopic fibres that make up what we all are. This biological science gives me a great edge when working on my fiction, as I have the capacity to know how a body would be affected, say, if you caused an injury on someone’s thigh. How the body reacts; how the pain gets managed; how serious the injury can be. All of this and more is pulled directly from my experience in my full-time job and helps me to get my writing spot on when it comes to combat, whether that’s a bullet shattering a skull or a knife cutting flesh. Gruesome, perhaps, but all the more realistic for it, and hopefully more engaging with the reader: you.

And street dance? Well, that’s another matter.

The movements of street dance are aggressive, and very often can be changed very quickly into martial arts moves and strikes. Because of the nature of street dance and how it interprets things around itself, this means that power, speed and impact all play an important role in dance, and as that is drawn from things such as martial arts and other physical activity, can be quickly reversed to learn something new.

This means that again, I can benefit in my writing from this through the use of street dance to emulate close combat manoeuvres. Need a powerful sweeping kick? Lay out a clockwise spin with leg extended. Close-in punches to the chest and face? You want tutting (a technical form of hand movements in dance). The list goes on, but you get the idea.

So don’t look at not being a full-time author as not having “made it”. Personally, whilst I used to aspire to do this full-time, I have learnt now that I have a much bigger benefit from my life experiences and how it helps my writing, than if I had only done writing as a profession.