When I was around eight, I learned how to touch-type at school, and I received a computer as a present. I started writing plays, and for many years I thought I would be a playwright.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
I did a lot of freelance desk publishing jobs when I graduated from college. I sort of earned a living doing that while I was writing plays, which was what I wanted to do. My hope was to become a playwright.
When I was about 12, I spent the summer writing four plays on my dad's old typewriter for a school play competition. And I wrote little comic bits at secondary school and at university.
I thought I wanted to be a playwright because I was interested in stories and telling stories.
I wanted to be a writer and an artist. Learning to type as quickly as I could think was a needed skill and part of my long self-directed apprenticeship.
I always wanted to be an actor, even as a little kid. So I went to drama school in the late '60s at Carnegie Mellon.
When I was about 14 or 15 I decided to become a writer and never for a moment since have I wanted to do anything else.
At an early school, when I was about 5, they asked what we wanted to be when we grew up. Everyone said silly things, and I said I wanted to be an actress. So that was what I wanted to be, but what I was, of course, was a writer.
I was playing the piano when I was three, writing songs when I was ten. I had a lot of experience before I got to college. I knew I wanted to be a singer, so anyone who met me, I didn't let too much time pass before I showed my talent.
Before I began concentrating on writing, in my free time I was an artist, making and selling etchings illustrating stories based on my readings in classical literature.
When I was young, I never thought I was going to be a writer! I was academically orientated and active at sports, but I didn't have one creative bone in my body.