C h a z z W r i t e s . c o m

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12/09/2010 • 2:39 PM 6

When did you know you wanted to be a writer?

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It’s a question I ask as part of the regular author profile feature (appearing in this space Thursdays.)

It’s one of those questions that I find endlessly fascinating, like:

1. How did you and your love first meet?

2. What do the voices in your head tell you?

3. Would you rather be right or happy?

Almost every writer, it seems, can remember the moment they felt the pull.

Maybe it happened when they read a great book. (Which book was it for you?) Or they like the lifestyle because they are unsuited for anything else (read: you are otherwise unemployable.) Maybe they had an amazing experience they had to share or teach. (What was yours?) Even a lousy book spurs some people to say, “I could do better than this crap!” (If that’s you, which book was it?)

For me, it began with reading, I’m sure, though there wasn’t a particular book that got me thinking writing was for me. I first announced my writerly intentions to strangers. I was maybe eight, though it’s hard to say. I ascribe any vague memory from childhood to that year and, in truth, it can’t possibly have been that eventful. That would leave all the other years empty of anything. But that is how it feels.

The strangers to whom I made my announcement were the printers at a local shop. I wandered in (ignorance is a strange propellant) and asked for paper. “For a book” I added, because I thought I needed to get it from them, for some reason now unfathomable.

I remember the inky and oily smell of the place and the noise of the machines. I loved that smell. I still love stationery stores. All those empty pages call to me. Due to this compulsion, which stops just short of a sexual fetish, I own many more journals than I’ll ever fill and many more pens than I could ever use. The smell in that shop (and the look and smell of sunlight on turquoise water colour paint) are the only solid sense memories I carry from early childhood.

The printers smiled, indulged me, and I walked out with some brownish scrap paper. I walked taller and with real purpose, probably for the first time. I should have been holed up in a library at that stage, though I did that, too. I always preferred books to people. Childhood was rough.