Telling stories has been a compulsion of mine since I could physically say, 'Once upon a time...' But in high school, I realized I could study creative writing in college and actually pursue it as a viable career.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Somewhere along the line, I realized that I liked telling stories, and I decided that I would try writing. Ten years later, I finally got a book published. It was hard. I had no skills. I knew nothing about the business of getting published. So I had to keep working at it.
I remember all the way back in high school thinking about writing books. And, in fact, I've written a lot of stories. I've got dozens of stories I've written that no one's ever seen.
I started out writing stories because that's all I wanted to read, but now I don't know if I'll ever write one again.
I started writing stories in my spare time.
I used to write stories a lot because you had to fill your hours some other way than watching television. So my imagination was vivid, and I used to write a lot of stories. I wrote a novel, which I still have, which is so awful.
I always wanted to be a writer, and I did want to be a novelist. In college I took a couple of classes that taught me I would never be a novelist. I discovered I had no imagination. My short stories were always thinly veiled memoir.
Writing is more about imagination than anything else. I fell in love with words. I fell in love with storytelling.
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.
I guess, when I left university, I liked the idea of being a writer, and I thought then that being a writer really meant that you were a novelist. But if one of the impulses for being a novelist is wanting to be a storyteller, I never had any urge to tell stories.
I did try to write stories in college because I was interested in writing, and I was interested in the sound of language, but I was just no good at narrative and at fiction.