I'm kind of surprised it's taken me so long to tell this story here....
I was a voracious reader in elementary school, tearing my way through books like they were all due back at the library the very next day. I'd read A Wrinkle in Time at least eleven times before finishing sixth grade, and I'd gone through every Hardy Boys title I could find. The days when my teachers passed out book orders to the class were like Christmas morning for me. And then somewhere in junior high my interest in reading dried up. You couldn't pay me to read. This became a problem when my ninth grade English teacher told our class we were going to have to do a certain number of book reports every trimester. I was a pretty good student and I enjoyed the teacher so I wanted to succeed in the class, but if that meant reading a book.... Well, let's say I had something of a stubborn streak at age fifteen, and leave it at that.
One day our class was down in the school media center looking for books to check out for our reports. As I was browsing over the shelves looking for something that wouldn't be painful for me to read, it occurred to me that there were literally hundreds, if not thousands, of books in our media center alone, to say nothing of book stores or the public library in town. Was it possible that my English teacher was familiar with every book there was? I didn't see how he could have been. And that was my loophole.
Instead of checking out books and taking the time to read and possibly enjoy them, I thought it'd be a better (easier) idea to just write reports about books that didn't exist. I knew I was taking a chance with this, but I was pretty sure I'd never get called on it if I just made them sound convincing enough. I figured my teacher would read the report and think, "Huh, haven't heard of that one before," and then just move on to the next one in the pile. My mother was a teacher, so I'd seen the repetitive, assembly line nature of grading papers firsthand. The odds had to be in my favor.
I invented authors, titles, main characters, page number counts, assigned them a wide variety of genres to show my diverse interests, wrote plot summaries and concluded them all with some trite statement about what I had learned from the story. I didn't read a single book in ninth grade, but I turned in so many book reports I may have earned some extra credit.
It's hard for me to pinpoint an exact answer if anyone ever asks when I started writing. But I'm pretty sure that part of my brain was alive and kicking by at least ninth grade.
