I remember when I fell in love with stories. In the fifth grade, my teacher, Mr. Lall, introduced our class to the book club. My mother allowed me to buy a maximum of three novels a month.
I pored over my options. I could rarely decide on just three, so my mother usually let me buy a fourth.
One of the first novels I read was Mary Higgins Clark’s novel about a busload of grade-school students that gets hijacked and the children are taken hostage.
I was completely terrified. It was so real. (I didn’t realize until later that it was a true story, and had recently happened in California.)
I trembled with excitement. I couldn’t put the book down. I was stunned that someone’s words could have such an effect.
I wanted to do it. I wanted to become a first-time novelist, and a year later, my teacher, Mr. Bell-Smith, had our class write a novel of our own. I wrote a five-chapter story called SHIPWRECKED! (I added the exclamation mark while writing the second chapter – the damn thing had earned it.)
I was developing a relationship with my imagination. It could take me to places I had never been before. It could invent exotic characters and situations that were utterly new to me. In fact, over the next few years, as my desire grew, I began to wonder if my imagination could give me a career, and a life.
I knew I wanted to create stories, even as I made a side trip into acting for a couple of years. For me, there was no greater thrill than losing myself completely in my imagination.
The day I knew I was going to be a writer for the rest of my life was bittersweet. I had been writing seriously for ten years and had not sold a single thing. It dawned on me that perhaps I never would.
Strangely, the pain of this realization transmuted into a sense of relief. The pressure was off, and I suddenly realized that in the most subtle way, I had been writing what I believed others wanted to read.
In that moment, I gave myself permission to write a story just for me. It would be thrilling, wry, dark, and heartbreaking all at once. I would explore areas that I dared never tell anyone about in my civilian life. And perhaps I would not even show it to anyone.
As I wrote it, I blushed with delight at how revealing I was giving myself permission to be, set loose from the idea that if you don’t sell your work you are a loser. I had accepted my loserdom status, and I was free.
I wrote the first draft quickly, in just around 90 days, in fact, and when I was done, I took the risk of showing my first novel to a friend. She liked it, and gave me some excellent notes. I did a quick rewrite, and she encouraged me to send it out.
It was the first piece of work I sold, and it was the birth of another first-time novelist.
Tell me your story. Why do you write?
