When I was 21, I wanted to write like Kafka. But, unfortunately for me, I wrote like a script editor for 'The Simpsons' who'd briefly joined a religious cult and then discovered Foucault. Such is life.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I wanted to write when I was young, but people said it was impossible. Then my parents locked me in a mental institution - they said I was crazy and would never make a living from writing.
I decided to become an author when my grandmother taught me to write, when I was six. I can still recall the sensation of being able to turn words into stories. It was a miracle.
I started writing in my 20s. I just wanted to write, but I didn't have anything to write about, so in the beginning, I wrote entertainments - mainly murder mysteries.
In my younger days, I was trying to write sophisticated prose and fantastic stories.
Certainly, my exposure in high school to writers like Flannery O'Connor, Shusaku Endo, Fyodor Dostoevsky and Graham Greene was formative.
Writing was something I always as a kid thought would be fabulous and glamorous to be a writer.
I didn't know anything about writers. It never occurred to me they were regular people and that I could grow up to become one, even though I loved to make up stories inside my head.
I've met writers who wanted to be writers from the age of six, but I certainly had no feelings like that. It was only in the Philippines when I was about 15 that I started reading books by very contemporary writers of the Beatnik generation.
My parents were avid readers. Both had ambitions to write that had been abandoned early in life in order to get on with life.
I tried writing fiction as a little kid, but had a teacher humiliate me, so didn't write again until I was a senior in college.
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