I can't remember a time in my life when I didn't want to write books. Even as a very young girl, I used to tell my mother, "When I'm a world famous author ..." I don't remember what I thought was going to happen when I became a world famous author, but something was. I'm really sure about that.
As a kid, I remember reading a lot. My earliest reading memory is of lying on the bed with my mom at naptime, listening as she read to me. I'm told that when I was just four, Mom would doze off and I would pick up the story where she left off. One day, it occurred to her that maybe I wasn't just reciting the words from memory, and my parents decided to test me with the newspaper. Sure enough, I could pick out some easy words from articles I'd never seen before.
My favorite story was "Tom Tit Tot," which is really the same story as "Rumplestiltskin," but Oh! So much better! To this day I can hear my mother's voice as she read the story to me. Even though I read that story to my kids and intend to read it to my grandkids, nobody reads that story like my mother does.
Later, my tastes turned to the Bobbsey Twins stories, and then to Nancy Drew. Oh, how I loved the Nancy Drew mysteries. By that time, I was old enough to start realizing that stories didn't materialize out of the air. Someone actually wrote them. And that's when the dream that some day I would grow up and become Carolyn Keene was born. Nothing seemed finer to my little girl's imagination than writing books about the intrepid sleuth and her chums.
I don't remember how old I was when my grandmother handed me the Readers Digest Condensed version of Victoria Holt's The Mistress of Mellyn, but I clearly recall that we were on vacation in Yellowstone National Park, because I can't think about that book without immediately being transported to a picnic table surrounded by towering pine trees.
My course was firmly set now. I would become Carolyn Keene and Victoria Holt, and I would spend my days writing dark, gothic mysteries about young, innocent heroines and dark, brooding heroes. Of course, all of that was before I found out just how unattractive real life dark, brooding men really can be. That life lesson effectively killed my desire to write about heroes at all. I went back to mystery as my first love and planned to write my own version of Nancy Drew -- minus Ned Nickerson.
Irving Stone entered my life as a young woman and convinced me that there would be no finer occupation in the world than writing about historical figures. I devoured every book of his I could get my hands on: Those Who Love (Abigail and John Adams), Immortal Wife (Jessie Fremont) , The President's Lady (Rachel and Andrew Jackson), Love is Eternal (Mary Todd and Abraham Lincoln), Lust for Life (Vincent Van Gogh), and The Agony and the Ecstacy (Michelangelo) were my favorites.
And then my mother-in-law introduced me to Catherine Cookson and my ambitions switched to England. Never mind that I'd never been there, or that I didn't have a clue about how to research. I was going to write the Great American Novel ... set in the UK.Eventually, I returned to America, determined to live James A. Michener's life. I would travel around the country, live in new places for two or three years at a time and write huge generational sagas set in each one. My love of the family saga knew no bounds, and I spent hours plotting out the genealogy of the fictional people I wanted to write about.
From the time I was old enough to hold a pencil, I wrote my stories on lined paper, in notebooks, and finally on the electric typewriter my (then) husband, parents, sister and brother bought me for Christmas one year. It was a marvelous piece of machinery! Almost magical, with a little roll of sticky tape that could peel the letter from your paper if you made a mistake. With this kind of technology at my fingertips, nothing could get in my way!
The list goes on, but I won't bore you with the whole thing. I'm endlessly grateful that my parents read to me when I was a very small girl and introduced me to my first great love -- books (and the people who write them.) It was hands' down the best thing anyone has ever done for me.
