There were two constants in my young life: reading and writing.
I have no idea if I learned to read early or easily, but once I had, there was no stopping me. I have memories of winning an award in elementary school for reading the most books. My mother used to go the library and bring me a stack of books. I would polish them off in a week and she would go back for more.
Apparently somewhere along the line I taught myself to speed read. Always impatience to find out what happened at the end of the story, I tore through books at a speed that continued to impress teachers and friends. Once in second grade we were reading a story in class. It was about ballerina shoes and the class had to all read it silently to themselves. I read the story, and when I was done I looked around to see how everyone else was faring. My teacher came over and told me I needed to read the story. When I told her I had, she told me to read it again, because she had only just finished reading it herself, and so there was no way I had read it that fast.
My love of writing came in fourth grade.
The assignment for the class was an illustrated storybook about a cute, furry creature who has a problem, in the form of a bad guy, and then solves it. My protagonist (not that I knew that word back then) was dutiful Cottontail, a female rabbit who was out picking clover for dinner when she ran into the antagonist, a bear. There was an ensuing chase and refuge in an underground hidey place, far from home.
The next day Cottontail decided that if she was going to get home, she had to deal with the bear. A plan hatched, she let the bear chase her to the edge of a cliff, where she jumped out of the way of his charge and he fell off the cliff and into the lake below where he drowned. Unsure as I was at the age of six on the spelling of ‘drowned’, I went to my teacher, Mrs. Ligon to ask.
She read over my story and praised me for my creative ending, in not just having Cottontail and a bear randomly become friends as many of my classmates were doing with their stories. That little bit of praise stuck with me, and I have been writing ever since.
