I think I was in second grade when I started writing. The teacher put these lines up on the blackboard and told us to finish the poem.

“Where are you going little leaf/I hope you don’t meet any grief.”

Most people added a single couplet. Some added two. I added twenty couplets and a four-line ABAB stanza. It was shown all around school, and put on the bulletin board for a PTA meeting. I may still have it somewhere. My mother was pleased.

A few months later I was sitting in my father’s chair with the lapboard, writing something. My mother asked me what it was. It old her it was a poem. She said, “You’ve written one poem, why would you want to write another?”

Several years later I was writing stuff, ideas for stories, lists of things, I don’t remember. I wrote a lot of lists. My father asked what I was doing, and I told him I was working on a story, that I wanted to be a writer. He said, “You’re not Ernest Hemingway and you never will be.”

Many years later I actually read something by Hemingway. It could have been the first pages of “For Whom the Bell Tolls.” I never got any further. I remembered what my father had told me, and if he had been still living I would have told him that he was right. And that I was grateful that I would never be like Hemingway. Because I did not like the way he wrote. Not at all. And I still don’t.

Writing is a major part of my life and I talk about it a lot. I speak on writing panels at SF conventions. I run two workshops at cons, about how to start, and about how to plot. I have posted to my Facebeek page about how I work, and the things I’ve learned, and I’ll be reworking some of those to be included on my Books page, which is not yet brought up to date. I love to talk to people at conventions, to help those who want to write get started, and to encourage them to do so. I have read over 120 books on writing and authorship, about a dozen of which I have found useful, a few of which I have thrown away. But the most important thing I learned was from writer autobiographies, who tell how they did it, not how to do it. And that is that every one does it differently.

It is demanding, it is frustrating, and sometimes it is disappointing. Some of the people who take my workshops decide that they don’t really want to become writers after all. And that’s fine, their energies are better spent doing something more satisfying and rewarding.

But when I succeed, I have created something out of nothing, just a spark of an idea which is completely intangible. From that spark comes a world, people, events, desires, all of which seem so real to the person reading it, that for a little while the reader loses track of the real world.

After all that effort of creation, I had to take some time off. Maybe a year, or a month, or a day — or an hour. And then a new spark comes and, despite all the hardships of the last time, I do it all over again.