When I was about 9, I was involved in an altercation with an authority figure that turned out to be quite formative for me.

As a fiction writer I tend to feel like this is a stupid question, whilst as a journalist it feels amateurish and slightly redundant to ask it. Read their work and it’ll often become pretty apparent – Irvine Welsh didn’t come up with Trainspotting because he spent a lot of time hanging around Disneyland, for example.