“Book”

I was a peaceful, easy-going baby. I didn’t cry or complain or even babble much. My parents say this is because I was already creative, off in my own little world.

We lived in our little house in Provo, Utah. I like to imagine my two older sisters playing upstairs, preoccupied. Downstairs, the smell of the homemade bread my mother always made for dinner lingers in the kitchen and floats into the adjacent living room, where my dad holds my hands and I totter around. I trip over a toy and fall down, but I laugh, and my mother scoops me onto her lap, holding me upright and kissing my head, already covered in curly, dark hair.  “Say ‘Mama’!” she coos. “Say ‘Daddy!’”

Entirely disinterested in their smiling and fussing, I reach my tiny hands toward our stack of cardboard picture books, and insist, “Book.”

My very first word? ‘Book.’ Yup. This would prove absurdly appropriate as I grew up.

It’s seventh grade, and I sit with my best friend, Sydney, in her bedroom—all blue. Blue walls, dark blue bed, light blue curtains. We chat and make tiny colorful stars out of paper while singing along to Hoobastank and Nickleback on her iPod. She’s so much cooler than me for having an iPod.

I notice a document opened on her computer. The title, typed in a mysterious-looking font, glows at me from across the room: Shadic.

“What’s that?” I ask, nodding at the computer.

She smiles a little self-consciously, tucking the tiny braid she always wears at the front of her highlighted, long hair behind her ear. “It’s a book I’m writing,” she says.

I gape at her. I love reading. By seventh grade, I’ve probably consumed more novels in the last year than many people do in their entire lifetime, and I always do well with writing short stories and such in English classes. Somehow it has never occurred to me to try to write a real, live book. “That’s awesome!” I moan, once again in awe of her superior coolness. “What’s it about?”

She tells me about her story, a fantasy, loosely based off Norse mythology, and then she lets me read it. I haven’t read much fantasy up to now, having usually stuck to historical fiction, and it dazzles me.

“This is really good,” I say honestly, and behind my eyes, wheels begin to turn.

The day after Sydney shows me her book, when I get home from school to my new house in Pleasant Grove, I deposit my stack of new books on the paper-strewn wooden bench in our living room where my younger sister and I throw our backpacks when we feel too lazy to put them away. I pull open a blank, white Microsoft Word document on our big, boxy Windows computer and start typing away. “Chapter 1—The Lightless City.”

I write about twenty pages within a few days. George Bernard Shaw said, “Imitation is not just the sincerest form of flattery – it’s the sincerest form of learning.” My writing’s not very good, and some of the events introduced in the second chapter borderline plagiarize Sydney’s Shadic (at the time I can’t think of any idea that could possibly be cooler than hers), but it still excites me, and I begin to learn.

I’ve always been creative; I daydream and make up adventures in my mind. Learning to put them on paper suddenly introduces a plethora of possibilities to me. For the first time, everything that has lived inside my mind can exist somewhere in reality.

The current version of my story bears virtually no resemblance to that first attempt, but interestingly, I never scrapped the whole idea at once. I started writing the thing in order, but I have become a better writer since I started, so I redid the beginning. I threw out the love triangle because it got in the way: massive sections, trashed. One of my characters insisted on developing a sense of humor, making obscure Shakespeare references, and finally going crazy, so I let him. Little by little, I rewrote until I had nothing left of “The Lightless City” but a few old notebooks and almost two-hundred printed-out pages of brain-dumping.

But the point is, it all started because I loved BOOKS.

Somebody said that reading usually precedes writing and the impulse to write is almost always fired by reading and that reading, the love of reading, is what makes you dream of becoming a writer. This was definitely true of me.

If you want to be a better writer, you need to learn to love to read, read, read, read, read, read, read!