I’ve thought about writing this personal blog post for a long time,
but part of me worried it would make me seem less legit as an author --- which I've come to realize is one of the reasons I really need to write it, so let me just say it:
I used to DESPISE
reading. I didn’t learn to love it until
I was out of college.
Why is this important?
A few reasons:
- Some people assume that if they don’t like to read, they
never will.
- Some people don’t understand why they (or their children/spouses/friends) don’t like to read.
- Some people assume that people who like to read (and/or
write) are entirely different from them.
So let me first make another confession:
I was a BAD teenager.
I was the opposite of a book nerd. I was the kid who got suspended (repeatedly)
for fighting in school and generally being a disrespectful little punk. I was the kid who flunked sophomore year for
skipping too many days. I was the kid
who ultimately got sent to a private school because public school couldn’t
handle me, and then had to get homeschooled when private school decided they
couldn’t handle me either. Had it not
been for my determined mother, I would have been a high school drop-out.
Rewind: In
elementary and middle school, I was always at the top of my class. I was in all of the advanced classes,
including advanced English classes, and I believe this is when my hatred of reading
and writing started. I was swamped with homework. I was forced to write book report after book
report on books I didn’t want to read, and that made me hate reading. I never had a
teacher who helped me figure out what types of books I might like, or who
explained that there are all sorts of different genres. I assumed I hated all books, and I never questioned this, even as an adult.
Lesson: If you
want your children to enjoy reading, forcing books on them is not the answer. Sure, kids should be encouraged and even
required to read, but a love of reading can only be borne out of genuine
interest. Encourage your children to
pick books they think they might like.
As a teenager, I liked rap.
Yes, rap. So I liked writing
poetry. Which is initially why I went to
college for Professional Writing (after drastically turning my life around). But even then, I never imagined myself
becoming an author, and I still didn’t enjoy reading.
What I did like
was zombies. After graduation, I heard
about Max Brook’s The Zombie Survival
Guide and decided to read it because it wasn’t traditional fiction. I loved it so much that I thought maybe I
could like reading other books about zombies, even if they were traditional
novels—which I had been conditioned to avoid—and I was right. Books like J.L. Bourne’s Day by Day Armageddon series blew me away.
Zombie lit was my
gateway drug.
I began devouring zombie books, but that was still as far as
I was willing to venture. Since my
dislike of reading was so ingrained in me by then, it didn’t even occur to me that I might like reading
other types of fiction.
Then, a few years later, a coworker (now one of my best
friends) randomly brought in a book she thought I might like to read: the first
book in The Iron Fey series by Julie
Kagawa. My coworker’s reason for
suggesting it? She simply thought the
main character’s voice sounded like mine and that I might connect with her.
When she described the book to me, I thought the faeries
sounded kind of cool, but romance? Seriously? Didn’t all of those books have to have Fabio
on the cover?
It took me months
to finally pick up the book and read it, but once I did I COULD. NOT. PUT. IT.
DOWN.
That was my
moment. That was the book that changed
my entire life.
God, I’m getting teary-eyed just writing this blog post because
I remember that feeling, that moment when I realized why some people LOVE
reading, that *I* could LOVE reading too--and not just zombie novels, but all sorts of novels.
I read that entire series in like three days, and I haven’t stopped
reading since. Now, I can’t imagine my
life without books.
My love of writing fiction came just as suddenly and
unexpectedly. Even though I got my
Bachelor’s and Master’s in Professional Writing, my studies had always been
geared toward nonfiction and teaching, never fiction. (I’m not one of those authors who spent their
childhoods writing stories in notebooks or dreaming up characters in their
heads.) About a year after I began
reading romance, I began running a creative writing workshop at the college
where I work, and those students pushed me to give creative writing a try
myself. One night, I gave it a go.
The very first
creative writing I ever did was my first (unpublished) novel, which I completed
in three weeks because I realized I loved
writing fiction.
As soon as I started typing that story, I was consumed. When I wasn’t writing, I was thinking about
writing, and I wrote an 86,000-word novel in three freaking weeks. Granted, it wasn’t my best work, but it was
the project that made me aware that this
is what I was meant to be doing.
I was meant to be a
writer.
So here’s the timeline:
Ages under 22 — despise reading; no interest in writing
fiction
Age 23ish — discover love of zombie lit
Age 25ish — discover LOVE of romance, YA, NA, ALL THE BOOKS
Age 26 — write first novel
Age 28 — get agent, get publishing deal, get all the happy
Moral of the Story:
It’s never too late to give reading a try.
If you don’t like one genre, try another, and then another. Everyone has to learn to love reading on
their own time, but I truly believe there is a book out there for everyone.
It’s also never too late to begin writing. If you have any interest in writing, write! The only way to get better at it is to keep
writing and writing and writing. Write
every day; keep getting better.
And finally, it never hurts to offer to lend someone a
book. You might just change their
life. ;)
-- I'd love to hear your own stories about how you learned to love reading and/or writing! Please share in the comments below!
