I think the impulse to get to the heart of the story and to tell it well is in my genes.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
It's impossible for me to disentangle how much of my storytelling urge is the product of growing up with novelist parents and how much is a genetic legacy from those same parents.
As a writer, I absorb stories, allow them to churn within my own head and heart - often for years - until I find a way of telling them that fits both my time and temperament.
My family are all storytellers, and I think I inherited a lot more of that gene than other people in my family. I guess I was fun to have around.
Every story I do is about people. It's my survival instinct - one person, one story.
I think that instinct, that storytelling instinct, rescued me most of my life.
Some, like Mother Teresa, are born with a gene to help the poor, and some are born with a gene to write. I was born with a gene to tell my story, and I just had to.
Most of my story ideas come from my childhood. Sometimes they hatch from stories my parents told me, sometimes they come from experiences in my own life, and sometimes they are inspired by mere moments.
Anyway, stories bring us together to find common ground, to find our way through life together, or just to entertain us, and I am just thrilled to be a part of that process.
My stories are fundamentally about the love of family.
When I decide to write a story, I don't think too much about what I want it to be, I just let things come naturally and this is how it turns out. It's just how my subconscious works.