the impact of your everyday life on your stories, as a kid

I was boy-mad early on, and one of the first stories I ever wrote was essentially a romance -- a college student has a flirty encounter with a man she later discovers is her professor. They kissed and everything. I think I was eleven at the time. I find this pretty funny now that I'm writing romances.

I think you're right, Deb -- I was also fascinated with death and illness. Beth in Little Women Mary and the-sick-boy-whose-name-I-can't-rmember in The Secret Garden, Sara Crewe losing her dad in A Little Princess. My mother was chronically ill with what we later discovered was lupus, so stories of orphans, widowers, death, and illness all resonated with me big-time as a reader. And some of the first stuff I tried my hand at when I got older was horror, with death and ghosts and...you probably get the idea.

Also, Deb, I was joking with the baby-underfoot stuff earlier, in that I knew you didn't mean that. It was just my painful joke, since it is so very, very true for me right now.

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I'm processing the variances between the stuff that interested us as children versus the stuff that we wrote or told stories about as children versus what we produce as adults.

This is fascinating. Right now I'm trying to think back to the kinds of stuff I wrote as a kid and what I like to write now. I have a feeling that what the two things have in common isn't so much the content (talking horses--of which I had a-plenty in jr. high stories) as certain story elements.

Stories I wrote then and things I've written in my adult life both tend to feature characters trying to discover the truth about their histories (Deb, this is one of the reasons I love the Penny and Ringan novels). I also started subverting traditional fairy-tale tropes at an early age. The thoughts then weren't "Let's subvert this trope" so much as "Wouldn't it be funny if..." I have also always preferred bittersweet or happy-sad endings to out-and-out happy endings.

The content and style of my writing have changed greatly, but if you replace the talking horses with burned-out detectives, there are some clear similarities.

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Speaking of talking about my own writing ... I posted this in Press, but ... I'm going to be on the KUCI's "Writer's On Writing" tonight, 5 p.m. PST, 8 p.m. EST, with host Barbara DeMarco-Barrett. Reading poetry, ranting about the man, whatever it is I do. Listen live at: [link]

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Well, I loved Narnia and Nesbit books and general fantasy and sci fi as a kid, but I write very naturalistic pieces. What drew me in were the characters--I have always been interested in books as a window into other people's lives and hearts. I also loved The Big House books and Alcott and Dickens for the same reason.

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because I was a little blonde girl in a wheelchair and should have drowned looking up in a rainstorm like a turkey, right?

One member of both my writing groups and a long-time friend still gets teased--it's become apocryphal--about the poem she tried to write about the Heaven's Gate cult, using suicidal turkeys as her metaphor.

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Now that I think about it, The Secret Garden was also the first musical where I noticed the sets as something other than just "stuff that makes it look like the place it's supposed to be."

I remember being extremely wary when a child psychologist or similar asked me to tell them a story. I'd always just tell the story of a book I was reading or a play I'd seen, and absolutely refuse to tell anything of my own. I couldn't have articulated why, but it just seemed way too personal to tell to some stranger who was obviously trying to get me to like him.

Since high school, most of what I've written, other than autobiographical stuff, has been things that were set sort of in the real world but with some magical elements -- ghosts or people with magic powers or things like that. A few attempts at YA romance that didn't really go anywhere, though a few of those are still in my "maybe I can figure out something to do with this" file. A few that went more toward the sci-fi end of things, but I haven't been happy with many of those -- I couldn't get the science to work out in a way that served the story, or I couldn't get the plot to work out in a way that didn't totally screw up the science.

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I'm *so* tagging "If you replace the talking horses with burned-out detectives, there are some clear similarities." Even if it does make me think Bayliss-as-Mr. Ed. "What kind of society *is* this, Wilbur?"

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I'm *so* tagging "If you replace the talking horses with burned-out detectives, there are some clear similarities." Even if it does make me think Bayliss-as-Mr. Ed. "What kind of society *is* this, Wilbur?"

You so should. When I first read that, I thought, "Huh, I thought I was reading Anne's post. I never noticed her post ending and erika's beginning," and had to scroll up to the top of the post, to name check.

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"What kind of society *is* this, Wilbur?"

can't... breathe...

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Wow. This really got me thinking.

The other thing that is a constant theme, both in my reading from childhood on and my writing? Women. Sounds broad, I know (ahem -- no pun intended), but it's women's lives, the daily details, what sets us apart from men, that has always interested me. In the Little House books, which I also adored, it was the chores the girls and Ma had to do just to get food on the table every day. In one of the books, Ma and Pa have to go away for a few days, and Laura and Mary decide to clean the house, including refilling the mattresses with fresh straw. I read that chapter over and over.

The historical perspective on women's lives -- how they've changed, what the limits used to be, what they still are -- have always fascinated me, but even now, I rarely read books written by men. And most of the nonfiction I read has a women's studies bent -- The Girl Sleuth by Bobbie Ann Mason, Hamlet's Mother by Carolyn Heilbrun.

Point being, almost everything I have an interest in writing has to do with some facet of that. I almost never write male protagonists, unless the form requires it (and romance does), and the books I long to write are YA stuff about girls, usually involving some paranormal aspect as a jumping off point or metaphor, and a novel that has to do with the relationship between three generations of women.

What drew me in were the characters--I have always been interested in books as a window into other people's lives and hearts.

This really resonates with me, although I guess I'm simply more interested in a window into women's lives. And now I feel terribly sexist.

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