Finding Your Roots

Why did I start writing? It's something I think about sometimes, in between hating my work, stressing over my laziness, and otherwise driving myself completely insane.

Original artwork for American Gods.

It's then I try to remember my first story, the first time I wrote something down. I remember doing the National Novel Writing Month Challenge in 2006, but before that I wrote prose and poetry through middle and high school. Even before that I recall hunching over the coffee table growing up and trying to write the sequel to Harriet the Spy. (After all, no one tells a kid about copyright laws. Or, apparently, fanfiction.) Before that, before I could actually write, I would take a crayon and a blank sheet of paper and painstakingly make "letters" and then sit down and tell my mother the story that I "wrote".

In that sense, I suppose I've always been a writer. But surely there was something there that shaped me, that made me into the writing I am today: uncertain and a little shaky, but confident in my own creativity and my desire to craft a story.

And it always comes down to books: The books I read as a child, the ones I read as an adult. More than The Elements of Style or any book on the craft of writing, it's novels themselves that have showed me the way. First with Tamora Pierce, who gave me a love of adventure, then Laurie Halse Anderson and Ann Brasheres whose characters were real, strong, and good, despite being in a real-world setting and written in a genre where it is so easy to portray teenage girls and woman as catty, cruel, and petty. Stephen King proved to me that not only movies can scare, and Haruki Murakami and Kafka melded the real world and the absurd. And Neil Gaiman: Neil Gaiman gave me someone to admire, someone to aspire to be like.

When I struggle, which I often do, I find myself looking at these books again. Yes, even the Tamora Pierce ones. Even Animorphs, a series I have in it's entirety on my Kindle despite first reading it when I was only ten years old. I'm twenty-three now, and I still sometimes read Animorphs.

I think it's important, remembering, reading, and re-reading these books. Because they meant so much the first time I read them, and they gave me things to aspire to. They make me remember my roots, remember thirteen-year-old Elle sprawled out on the floor thinking about how much I would love to write stories like these. And sometimes they make me realize that even though I did not end up being a published writer at sixteen (just like Amelia Atwater-Rhodes), I've still written stories that I think thirteen-year-old me would like. And that might not be a publishing contract or millions of dollars, but it's something, and it keeps me going.

What are the books that shaped your writing? Do you ever reread them, even if they're directed for younger readers?