Mine is not the story of the little girl who embarked on her lifelong love affair with books whilst blissfully rambling through her local public library. I never begged to go to the library; I usually begged to go home.
I hated that library-book smell. I always seemed to get a headache among the stacks, probably from the dust or fluorescent lighting. I had too much energy, too little patience.
It was my mom’s gentle refrain—a promise, in fact—that if I just gave any book a few chapters to win me over, the magic could commence. But at seven years old, I never allowed the spell any time to sink in. What I didn’t realize was that I was already trying to practice this magic on my own. Because instead of curling up on the couch so some writer could spirit me away, I spent most free hours crawling on my bed, leaping over objects (sometimes my brothers), creating vast narrative epics with my Ty Beanie Babies. I wanted to be a storyteller—although I didn’t know we already had a name for this kind of incantation. I daily surrounded myself with backstories, sequels, prequels, and twist endings while ignoring their existence between the covers of books. Much earlier than the glowing memory of my mom reading The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe to us is the glow of our boxy Gateway computer as I tried to capture some Beanie epic for posterity.
But my mom (bless her) persisted in inflicting the wonders of the library upon me. And it was during one of those listless wanders that I finally discovered characters with a strange resemblance to my Beanie Babies: dogs that talked (at least to themselves) and took themselves much too seriously, with delicious hilarity ensuing. Between the narcissistic Hank the Cowdog and lovable Harold in Bunnicula, I found protagonists who were not only hapless and curious, but also self-aware of the stories they were in, storytellers all their own.
When I was thirteen, I also took myself much too seriously by deciding that I would become a career author—with hilarity ensuing. While I sometimes read books on writing, I largely learned writing by reading novels, particularly the old ones encountered in many rote high school reading lists: Silas Marner, Dandelion Wine, The Catcher in the Rye. Even when I wanted to understand our present moment, I processed problems by finding parallels with the past, if not picking history apart to make new worlds and possibilities. My narratives sprawled through medieval Europe, the American Civil War, Victorian England. My reading also remained stubbornly farsighted. In adolescence, while my friends were reading Twilight, I was reading Wuthering Heights, equally enthralled with a very different kind of paranormal.
Whenever I’m not writing, I’m reading—but never both at once. It seems to fit the rhythms of my brain to learn and create in discretely different seasons: reading something new, planting seeds, then harvesting the stories that grow out of me after some combination of ideas has taken root.
Some part of me still prefers to create stories rather than submit to being the audience and not the author, and so writing and reading continue to share a lively, if not competitive, symbiosis as the two bookends of my brain. Strangely, I’ve come to love the friction between the two. That energy (the magic) I gain for writing comes as much from their harmony as their dissonance. Each will always be essential for the other’s survival—and thus my own.
