One of the most common questions writers gets asked is:
Did you always want to be a writer?
This question usually comes from aspiring writers who want to know if they’re… one the right path. (Or, you know, the write path.) Was it a lifelong passion for reading and writing or some other series of chance events that led me to my career? In a long nutshell, here goes:
I never considered myself a reader. In school I was always math and science girl who wanted to be a marine biologist or a veterinarian. I hated language arts and blamed it on the fact that my first three years of school were in French. Now I know better. There were two reasons I shied away from reading and writing when I was in school.
One, because my English teachers ranged from unexceptional to ridiculously neurotic. In my junior year American Lit class, we never had one essay question on a test. They were all Scantron. How is that even possible?
Two, because the books I enjoyed reading (and now love writing) were the ones that “didn’t count”. I adored series like Nancy Drew and The Baby-Sitter’s Club and Sweet Valley High and, well, according to teachers and other grown-ups, if it wasn’t Lord of the Flies or The Red Badge of Courage or Billy Budd then it was a waste of words. Lesson to literary snobs: this is precisely how “children who hate reading” are born.
Fast forward to my freshman year of college. In my first semester literature class we read Pride & Prejudice. It changed my life. For the first time, I truly loved a book that was “important” enough to read for class–at Columbia, an Ivy League school, no less.
I looked at books differently after that.
Then, after college and a year off, I started in a Masters program at Columbia. My degree is in Historic Preservation and has nothing whatsoever to do with writing except this: during my thesis defense, one of my advisors said, “Tera, you’re a very effective writer.” Now, he was only saying that to soften the blow of wanting me to cut the first half of my thesis, but those words stayed with me.
After graduation, when I was back home and basically house-sitting for my parents, his words rattled around in my brain. During that time I also started reading romance novels. Obsessively. I would drive into town to the bookstore, bring home a huge stack, tear through them, and go back for more.
Somewhere along the way, I started wanting the characters to say/do things differently. Finally, between my renewed love of reading and the confidence my advisor’s compliment gave me, I decided to try my hand at this writing thing.
So that’s it. No childhood dreams of become a writing. No formal education in creative writing. In fact, I can only remember one creative writing project in my entire education career, and that was in my high school Biology II class.
Funny aside: For that project, we had to make up a human genetic mutation. I wrote about how humans developed a membrane in their throats to be able to filter oxygen from water. The first step toward mermaid fiction for sure.
The short answer is no. I didn’t always know I wanted to be a writer, but once I found writing I knew I never wanted to do anything else.
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