At every event and in every interview I’ve ever done, I get asked a version of a question about how I became a writer. So I thought I would take a few minutes to answer that question here on the blog.
If you’d rather watch a video version of this post, check this out:
Did you always know you wanted to be a writer?
Heck to the no. Growing up, I hated reading. Or at least I thought I did.
Turns out, I actually just hated reading the books I was supposed to read.
I absolutely loved reading books that so many voices of “authority” said didn’t count. Books like The Baby-Sitter’s Club, Sweet Valley High, and Nancy Drew.
For a long time I thought I hated English/Language Arts. I blamed it on my first three years of school being in French. I thought I didn’t understand English grammar.
In reality, I just had bad teachers. I can name one teacher in my entire educational career who made me actually enjoy English class. One.
Science Girl
Instead, I was math and science girl. My 8th grade math teacher told my parents they had to push me to become a professional mathematician. Seriously.
Luckily for me, my parents pretty much laughed in his face. Because even though I was good in math, I hated that subject too.
The only subject I truly loved (and still do love) was science. I loved everything about science. I took as many science classes as I could:
- 2 years of biology
- 2 years of chemistry
- earth science
- physics
At various times in my life I was going to be:
- an astronaut
- a veterinarian
- a marine biologist
- an environmental biologist
So how did this science-loving, reading-hating girl grow up to be a story- and writing-obsessed author? It all started with Jane Austen.
Jane Austen
In my freshman literature class at Columbia, we read Pride and Prejudice. I LOVED it! I READ it! Cover to cover. Which, despite my good grades I rarely did.
It blew my mind that a book I loved was important enough to be studied in an Ivy League lit class. That changed my entire point of view on books. Suddenly, they didn’t have to be painful, boring, metaphorical and rhetorical punishments in order to be valued, in order to be worthy.
They could be fun. They could be romance!
Now, did I immediately become and English major and declare my love of creative writing? No.
I transferred to the University of Colorado at Boulder and became a theatre major, which was pretty much in my blood. (It still is, and one day I am going to write a play.)
Then I went to grad school. I ended up getting a Masters of Science (yes, still science) in Historic Preservation (basically saving old buildings) back at Columbia.
That turned out to be a very expensive degree that I use not one little bit.
BUT it was absolutely worth it for one seemingly insignificant, yet pivotal moment.
A Pivotal Moment
I was in my masters thesis defense, in which your advisors tell you what works and doesn’t work in the first draft of your thesis. My thesis was the longest thing I had ever written in my life. I think it was maybe 80 pages, with a lot of illustrations. I felt immense.
One of my advisors, a man with a PhD in architecture from MIT who literally could not speak in anything less than four-syllable words, said to me:
Tera, you’re a very effective writer
Then the other shoe dropped and he explained that he wanted me to cut the first half of my thesis.
Which was devastating, of course, but I was completely stunned.
I had never considered myself a good writer. Sure, I’d never re-read or even proofed a paper that I wrote until that thesis and still got As and Bs. But a good writer?
Hmmm….
That compliment stuck with me. Long after graduation. Long after I went back home and struggled to find a job in the field I’d just paid a ton of a money to study.
It rumbled around in my mind, over and over again.
In that time, post-graduation, I also started reading. A lot. I was living back home, alone, in the middle of nowhere without much else to do.
Every week I would drive into town, go to the shiny new Barnes and Noble, and buy a new stack of books. They were almost exclusively romance novels.
I started out reading all the sub-genres and slowly circled in on my favorite: historical romance.
Is it any wonder, considering how much I loved Pride and Prejudice?
So between all that reading and my advisor’s comment, I started thinking…
A New Path
What if I tried to write a book?
It didn’t happen instantaneously of course. But it started there.
I kept reading.
I started studying, seeking out articles and advice online—which was pretty hard to find in the very early 2000s.
And I started writing.
It took me a few projects before I found one that I would actually finish.
It took me a few finished projects before I got an agent’s attention with the book that would become Oh. My. Gods.
But that’s how it happened.
I don’t have an MFA. I have never taken a creative writing course in my life, and probably never will.
I learned by reading, by absorbing what other writers shared online and in workshops, and by writing.
And that’s how I became a writer.
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