I can’t believe how far behind I’ve gotten with these things. Jess is now up to WWQ#9 now, and here I am only a third of the way done! Here’s her third question:

Writer’s Weekly Question #3: When did you know, really know that you were a writer and that you would be a writer for the rest of your life?

Bonus Question: What was the first thing you remember writing after you discovered you were a writer?

I was writing things when I was in first grade. I was attempting to create science fiction stories that I’d hate to look at today. So I think I always felt I was a writer.

I don’t really remember discovering that I was a writer, so much as discovering that people might have an interest in reading what I was writing. I’ve told the story before about being in gym class when I was in 6th or 7th grade, writing a short story, and having a friend sit next to me and ask to read it. Before I knew it, several other people had joined us, and one would pass pages to the next one. I noticed, after about a dozen people had finished their routine was and had joined us on the bleachers, that there was a chain of people reading and waiting for the next page.

In 9th grade, following an English assignment in which we had to pick a contemporary topic and write an editorial about it, our teacher did something that surprised us: he sent our letters to the local newspaper, and mine was one of them that got published on the Editorial page. For a 14 or 15 year old, that was a thrill. The editorial, by the way, was about the Confederate Flag at the top of the South Carolina state capitol and why I felt it didn’t belong there. It only took the state another 15 years or so to finally take it down.

The story I was writing at gym class that day was about a distant cousin of mine who had recently passed away in a car accident. He was 17 as I recall, a good-looking, fairly popular kid who seemed to be, in many ways, what I wasn’t. I would have envied him had I ever gotten the chance to know him. That’s the story that I was working on when I made the discovery that people might read what I wrote.