Becoming a Writer

Growing up, several kids I knew, including family, said they were going to be a writer when asked what they were going to be when they grew up. Me, always the smart mouth (it’s called satire) always answered that I wanted to be a politician or a comedian—it’s the same difference.

Seriously, at the age of sixteen, I became a nurse’s aid and worked 32 hours a week at the local hospital while finishing the last two years of high school. My mom was a nurse and several of my cousins were nurses, so it was in my genes. I would be a nurse.

During high school enrollment, I wanted to take chemistry, but the class didn’t fit my schedule. For no apparent reason, the counselor put me in creative writing. I have no idea what possessed her to do that, and it was not a class that appealed to me.

Nonetheless, it was an easy class. To this day I’m not a fan of writing haiku poetry. What saved me was learning the mathematical formula for writing haikus.

Fast-forward to the next year. I liked the class and enrolled in the next level of creative writing. I didn’t get into the chemistry class until college, where I took a third creative writing class. Without giving creative writing much thought, I went on to nursing school.

Years later, we moved to the capital city. There was a record-breaking blizzard that winter. It was a whiteout; we couldn’t see as far as the street. The wind blew amazing snowdrifts, which was great fun for the kids once we could get outside.

During the blizzard, our neighbor called and said she had nothing to read. She reads like normal people breathe. She had read the books she had more than once, so she went through all of her cookbooks. Looking back now, I could have loaned her a couple of novels. What I did was write a short story and email it to her.

Then came the call: “What happens next?”

Honestly, I hadn’t thought about it. I was busy with the boys being stuck indoors. I told her that I would write more that night after the boys were in bed. For the next three weeks I wrote for an hour or two, and emailed each product to her. In about forty hours, the first draft of Kathryn’s Beach was written.

The blizzard was over, the snow had melted, and life went on. But, no, she wanted to know what happened next. In the same way as before, High Tide and Storm Surge were written. As a side note, Storm Surge was originally titled Atonement. Obviously, Atonement didn’t fit the two-word beach- themed titles of the other two books, thus, Storm Surge was the new title.

That’s how it happened. That’s how I became a writer.