I wrote before I could write. I got my hands on a journal, maybe a hand-me-down; I had three older siblings. My first entries are in the handwriting of the sister closets in age (5 years my senior). She must have gotten tired of my dictations because she gave up and then my blocky scrawl shows up. I wrote plays as a kid mostly.
I started out when I was 29 - too young to write novels. I was broke. I was on unemployment insurance. I was supposed to be writing a Ph.D. dissertation, so I had a typewriter and a lot of paper.
I came from a family of incredible storytellers, but I didn't start writing children's books until I was 41 years old.
A novel usually begins, in my experience, with a thought or image that won't leave me alone.
I had worked in this New York theatre company for my first eight or nine years out of college, acting and directing there, and I'd begun to write a little bit.
When I look back at my career as an author, I don't look at the first book that was ever published as to where my career began - I look to the first book that I ever wrote.
My early life had a lot to do with my origins as a writer, but I didn't get into doing any writing at all until I was about 35 years old.
If beginnings terrify you, or if you just plain don't like writing them, or if they bore you, skip 'em.
I don't know how old I was when I started writing books. But, I was born in 1931, and I wrote my first book in 1961.
I started my first novel when I was 10, and have produced thousands of pages of juvenilia since.
I never really wanted to be an actor. And that was the beginning of it, I began to write things down and eventually became a writer on a television show.
I started trying to write when I was in second or third grade.
