Have you always been a writer? If not, when did you start?
No, I’m not one of those authors you read about who has always written. But I’ve always been a reader and, like most readers, always thought, “I could do that.”
In my twenties, I dabbled in poetry. Very cringe-worthy poetry. Around that time, I also made several false starts on writing novels. I quickly realized that I didn’t know how to keep going past the first few pages. I’m going to age myself here and say that this was before the Internet really took off. Which meant I had to go to a bookstore and buy several how-to-write books. Unfortunately, they were drier than century-old bones. I’ve never been big on forcing myself to muddle through misery, so I didn’t finish any of them.
Life and my career got in the way, but I always thought “someday.” Then, one day I read an interview with one of my favorite authors, Mary Higgins Clark. She said, and I’m paraphrasing here, that if you are a writer, you write. You’ll write any time you get a chance. If you say, “someday I’ll write,” you’ll never write. Since I didn’t personally know any authors, I took her words as gospel and packed away my author dreams with my drier than the Sahara writing books.
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