I started writing when I was 21. I was going to become an historian. And then I realized there was more to the world than just the past. I didn't want to spend my life in the library.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I wanted to be a novelist from a very early age - 11 or 12 - but I don't think I ever thought I would write historical fiction. I never thought I might write academic history because I simply wasn't good enough!
Well, I always wanted to write from the time I was very little, and my mother encouraged me. She wrote a journal from the time she was 15 up until about the age of 76.
I didn't write much until I turned 40. Up until then I felt constrained by a sense of the discipline of New Testament studies and a sense of the ruling elite in theology and biblical studies.
I wrote my first book when I was in my late thirties.
When I was still in prep school - 14, 15 - I started keeping notebooks, journals. I started writing, almost like landscape drawing or life drawing. I never kept a diary, I never wrote about my day and what happened to me, but I described things.
By the age of nine or ten, I knew that I loved history and writing. It got hold of me and never turned loose.
I began writing seriously in my mid-20s and didn't publish my first book until I was 41.
I started writing when I was twenty, and my first book came out seventeen years later.
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.
I really started considering myself a writer when I was about seven or eight years old. I wrote stories from my dreams and kept them all in a notebook that I still have.