"Why did you want to be a writer?"

For the next few weeks I’m going to be sharing a lot about me as a writer, my novel, my characters, my process, and my past. Today, I’m going to touch on one question that I get. I think it’s a pretty standard question - Why did you want to be a writer?

To be a little writery here, I don’t know that I ever decided to write. As a kid I was a ferocious reader. Not even parachute day for PE was as exciting as the days the teachers would pass out the Scholastic Book Club order forms. I’d mark those up like the Sear’s catalog at Christmas. At one point my nice mom even had me signed up for a monthly book club and books like Mr. Popper’s Penguins would show up in the mail. Funny enough, I don’t remember the story, but I remember that book arriving in the stiff cardboard box.

My imagination was active - maybe more active than the people around me realized - but in my own head I was always spinning tales. It wasn’t just my Barbies that had active lives in my imagined world; all of my dolls and toys had names and many had imaginary backstories. For example, my Grandma Grape made all of us cloth dolls one year. She wanted them to resemble us but I asked for a red-haired, green eyed girl I could name Karen Irene. Don’t ask me why but Karen Irene was from Ireland. I still have Karen, tucked away in a tote in my closet with my Cabbage Patch Kids. She probably deserves a better story ending, so maybe she’ll make her way to a future book.

From a wild imagination and a love of words on pages, I think writing was inevitable, and like so many others, my writing journey started in elementary school with the encouragement of a teacher. I loved any assignment that involved writing, and was the annoying kid in the corner that celebrated every time there was a book report due. Those were things I always knew I could finish and finish well. In 1987, at the age of 11, I started on a little kid adventure with poetry outside of the classroom and wrote a poem called Death. What can I say, I was a thinker.

I’ve written in these pages about writing Death before. I had the idea in my head for days and let it tumble around with the rest of the things that were always tumbling around up there. You guys have no idea how many TV episodes I rewrote in my head! But I digress - I sat on my bedroom floor at the Lane Co cedar chest that I used for everything from tea service to writing desk, and I wrote the poem. When I finished I read it to my mom and she loved it, I’m sure, but I don’t remember what she said. (I’ll write later about having my mom read the first draft of The Myth Maker!) When I showed it to my aunt at the softball game my dad and uncle were playing in, I’m sure she loved it too because she’s like a mom, but I don’t remember exactly what she said either.

It was my dad’s reaction that stuck out for me, and I took it in a way I think only a young aspiring writer could have. When I had my dad read it after the softball game that night he said “did you write this or did you copy this from something else?” and it was a real question that I think he expected could have gone either way. I can hear your gasps out there but here’s the the way 11 year old me took it- This is good shit and my dad thinks a real writer wrote it. I was thrilled. Thrilled. I’m decades from 11 now but I still remember it.

The author, circa 1980, probably telling herself a story.

See, my dad is also a writer. He wrote newspaper articles and such when I was a kid, mostly as a hobby. For a long time his blue typewriter sat on the chunky wood desk in the kitchen and I loved that thing. My type teacher in high school would be surprised to know that, but I really did. I loved being able to play on it, listening to the click-clack on the keys, unsticking them when my chicken pecking would get a little carried away, and fixing typos with the Scotch tape trick. That typewriter was so cool and my dad thinking a real writer could have written the poem I actually wrote was more cool.

Basically, I have always been a writer. It wasn’t something I decided to do; it’s something I just do. Writers are individual but I think there are a few things most of us have in common, and one of those commonalities is we like encouragement. We like knowing people like reading the words we string together. All these years later I still stress myself out every time I send out a draft to a reader, anxiously waiting for the first bit of feedback that says I’m not writing trash. And every now and then, when that self-doubt kicks in, I remind myself of younger me, way back in the summer of 1987, writing something good enough my dad thought I’d stole it.