In listening to interviews, I’m always a tad horrified when the author gets asked about their genesis as a writer. The common truth seems to be “What do you mean, I’ve always written,” and I feel the same way! However I also realize that’s not a very interesting answer, so I thought it would be fun to dig a little deeper with my most handy interview subject … myself. So here goes:
I came to writing through reading. The first fictional characters I ever connected to were Harry Crewe/Harimad-sol and Drizzt Do’Urden, and in middle school, I wrote an illustrated fan letter to R. A. Salvatore. My love for books sparked the desire to create, and since then it’s been more about what’s kept me away from writing than what’s led me to it. I was also intensely private about my writing for many years. It’s only been since 2010 or so that I realized in order to get better I would have to participate in workshops and critique groups, hang out with other writers, try writing and submitting short stories, learn how to properly revise a novel, etc. That was really a turning point for me. I’ve never lacked for drive or motivation (or sheer stubbornness), but I did have to consciously shift gears to hone my craft. In a way I credit writing podcasts like Writing Excuses, Adventures in Sci-Fi Publishing, and I Should Be Writing for helping me realize I didn’t have to do this alone. The writing community is full of amazing and generous people.
Like you, I’ve always been a reader, and the imagination of the authors I loved inspired me to want to be like them. So I’ve always WANTED to write fiction, but the experience was just too difficult, too frustrating, and ultimately too painful in how badly I did at it. What really changed for me was being forced to write things I didn’t want to write. First news articles on sporting events in college and then essays on the radio and record industry. But I wrote SO much over a decade that it provided a wonderful thing to me: A more disciplined and knowledgable approach to writing fiction. So when I started writing short fiction two years ago, the disaster of a writer that I was at 18 was not just long past chronologically but also much improved.
Thanks so much for your comment, Jake.
Yes, exactly!
It does seems like years of pain and suffering and slowly figuring out how to write well is part of the process, but I’d never thought about it in the context of shifting focus from fiction to nonfiction and back again. That’s a really interesting perspective! Here’s to being better writers than our teenaged selves. Yikes