Blogfest 2009

I had a lot of stories floating around in my head when I was growing up, but the first time I remember writing one of them down was in the third grade. I wrote a play about Santa Claus, and my teacher was good-humored and supportive enough to let me hold auditions and rehearsals during recess, and then my classmates and I performed the play for the rest of the class.

Apparently third grade was a magical year for me, because it was also the year that I watched the movie Romancing the Stone for the first time. The heroine of the story is a romance novelist, and after finishing the movie, I enthusiastically announced to my mom that I was going to grow up to be a romance writer, too. By the time I got to college, I’d long since forgotten my dream of becoming a writer, and I majored in health and zoology (I wanted to be a marine biologist or a spy). A few years after graduation, my husband registered me for an online writing class for my twenty-fourth birthday. He’d debated between the writing class and Japanese cooking lessons, but on a whim went with the writing class. Fate, I tell you! It was in that class that I started writing what would eventually become HUSH, HUSH.

Have you ever had a Defining Moment? One of those moments in life that you *know* is important, even as it’s happening – a moment that changes you forever?

I still remember my first. I was seven years old, riding in the car with my mom and my younger brother, when it hit me.

“Mom,” I said. “Mom! I have something to tell you.”

“Mm?” my mom said, her eyes on the road. “What’s that, sweetheart?”

“I like something *even more* than reading!” I said.

This was an important announcement. My brother was only 4 at the time, but even he was astonished by it. As everyone in my family knew, I loved reading more than anything else in life.

“I like writing even better,” I said, and I felt everything shift into place inside me. “That’s what I’m going to be,” I said. “I’m going to be a writer.”

My mom and brother may no longer remember that conversation, but I’ll never forget it. It was my first Defining Moment, and it’s stayed true for my entire life. Before then, I’d had all sorts of ideas for what I might be as an adult – an astronomer? an astronaut? a paleontologist? But from that moment onward, I was a girl with a mission: I was going to be a professional writer.

I tried all sorts of different angles. First, because I thought short stories were too hard, I decided to write poetry. Well. I can’t say that worked out too well. I did have one uplifting success – I sold a poem to a kids’ magazine and was thrown into bliss (and excitement – I was going to be paid *$14.00*!) – but then the magazine went out of business without publishing my poem or even paying me. *Sigh*. Luckily, by then I was beginning to realize that I wasn’t a very good poet anyway…and as wonderful as good poetry is, it’s never been my favorite thing to read.

So I turned back to fiction, which was what had sucked me into writing in the first place, and I realized the truth: writing stories *is* hard…but it’s also magic. I fell in love with books when I was tiny, fell in love with the amazement of getting to lie down on the grass next to the lilac bushes in my own back yard and be transplanted to a whole different world, anywhere the author wanted to take me. But writing – well, my seven-year-old self was right: writing really is even better. When I write, I get to write the books that I wish were on the shelves already: the books I most want to read. And that’s the most magical experience of all.

What about you guys? Have you ever had one of those Defining Moments, when you had a major, life-changing realization? And has it still stayed true for you?

My parents were always big readers so I grew up going to the library on a weekly basis. As soon as I was old enough to grasp the concept that it was someone’s job to write the books I knew that was what I wanted to do. I loved the idea of creating whole new worlds, creating characters, seeing my books in print, and having people read what I wrote.  Then there is the added bonus that a lot of the time you can work in your sweatpants with your hair tied back in a scrunchie that has been around since 1990.

I actually remember the exact moment that I decided that I wanted to be a writer. I was ten years old, and I was worried about my future. Here I was, getting older, double digits now, and I didn’t have a career plan. So I asked my dad, “What should I be when I grow up?” He took me seriously and said, “Well, you’re creative. You could be an architect or an interior designer or a writer or an investment banker…”

I stopped listening at the word “writer.” I had always loved books — that’s thanks to my mom, who introduced me to Charlotte the spider and Faun Tumnus and Taran the Assistant Pig-Keeper — but I had always thought of writers as these magical, mythical beings who cast these spells that enchanted me. Until my practical father listed it out as if it were an ordinary career, it simply hadn’t occurred to me that an ordinary person could become a writer.

After that, I latched onto the idea. I raided the library for every how-to-write book that I could find. I drew maps of imaginary places. I created lists of superpowers and magical objects. I even read the phone book in search of perfect character names. (Probably the only middle schooler for hundreds of miles to do that.) And of course, I wrote and wrote and wrote. And I never stopped.

It was just a hunger I had to write. I don’t know where the hunger came from. It was just in my heart. I remember one summer during college I worked at Sears in Hollywood, and I told the other sales clerks that I wanted to be a writer. They all laughed and one of them said, “What are you going to write about – working at Sears?” Then another one told me to marry a doctor or a lawyer and forget about writing. And my mother wanted me to go to law school. My dad said if I was going to write, I should write mysteries because I would make more money. I didn’t listen to any of them because my hunger was just too strong.