When you're the only pea in the pod, your parents are likely to get you confused with the Hope Diamond. And that encourages you to talk too much. Getting into the habit of talking too much is fine if you're destined to be a lawyer or a politician or an entertainer. But if you're going to be a writer, it's death. We have many writers nowadays who don't realize this.
Writers have to cultivate the habit early in life of listening to people other than themselves.
And if you're born into a big family, as I was, you might as well learn to listen, because they're not going to give you much chance to talk. With twenty uncles and a dozen aunts, all old enough to have earned the right to speak whenever they wanted to open their mouths, there was not a great demand for us three children to put in our oar and to liven up the discussion. I've never been able to complete an accurate count of the number of cousins I have. But I have cousins to the utmost degree. In addition to first cousins, I have second, third and fourth cousins, plus cousins many times removed.