Nathan Filer and The Shock of the Fall: Real work is grist to a good novelist’s mill - Telegraph

Writers might perfectly well find their second jobs devoid of imaginative interest - it is hard to see what use Kurt Vonnegut made of running the first Saab dealership in America. Or they might well find their day job creeping into their work in unexpected ways. The flood of soulless City workers in The Waste Land comes directly from TS Eliot's experience in a bank. The novelist and poet Roy Fuller spent most of his life as a solicitor for a provincial building society, and his orderly, specific fictions of right and wrong offer a powerful insight into a world few novelists have the opportunity to observe in detail.