Author, I Never is a new segment in which I interview fellow authors about the writing process, breaking into the industry, and breaking rules. I try to mix it up a little and ask some hopefully novel questions along with some of the old standards, and finish it up with a round of I Never (kid friendly version) to find out what cardinal writing rules we've broken.

Question the first: E, when did you first know you wanted to be a writer?

It’s always hard to answer this question because I don’t really remember. When I ask my mother it sounds like I never had any doubt. As soon as I realized people wrote books and that was their job, I knew that was what I wanted to do.

Author, I Never is a new segment in which I interview fellow authors about the writing process, breaking into the industry, and breaking rules. I try to mix it up a little and ask some hopefully novel questions along with some of the old standards, and finish it up with a round of I Never (kid friendly version) to find out what cardinal writing rules we've broken.

Question the first: Joanna, when did you first know you wanted to be a writer?

 When I was about six, I decided I wanted to be a poet when I grew up. That quickly morphed into wanting to be an author (thank goodness!). I wrote my first story at seven, and it was about four female mystery-solvers investigating a string of neighborhood pet-nappings. The villain was a guy in a gorilla suit. For obvious reasons, I never finished it. :D But I continued to write all through my childhood and teen years, and was submitting things to magazines pretty early on. My crowning childhood achievement was getting published in Stone Soup when I was thirteen. I didn’t do a lot of writing during college, but the summer after I graduated, I finished my very first novel, inspired by the discovery of NaNoWriMo. I haven’t looked back!

Author, I Never: Dana Mele Interviews Eliot Sappingfield. Author, I Never is a new segment in which I interview fellow authors about the writing process, breaking into the industry, and breaking rules. I try to mix it up a little and ask some hopefully novel questions along with some of the old standards, and finish it up with a round of I Never (kid friendly version) to find out what cardinal writing rules you've broken.

Question the first: Eliot, when did you first know you wanted to be a writer?

 It was during college. I’d been double-majoring in physics and philosophy for reasons that made sense to me at the time, and came to a realization that I wasn’t enjoying what I was doing. So I decided to work on what I really loved. Plus, physics was really hard.

Author, I Never: An Interview with Sean Easley

Author, I Never is a new segment in which I interview fellow authors about the writing process, breaking into the industry, and breaking rules. I try to mix it up a little and ask some hopefully novel questions along with some of the old standards, and finish it up with a round of I Never (kid friendly version) to find out what cardinal writing rules we've all broken.

Question the first: Sean, when did you first know you wanted to be a writer?

Great question! My first inkling came when I was in third grade. I was an obnoxious, super-ADHD kid who would always finish his work before the rest of the class and spend all his free time falling out of his chair for attention. My third grade teacher realized that as long as I had something to occupy my mind, I’d stop being such a distraction to everyone else, so she taped a list of projects to my desk—tasks for me to work on when I finished my other work. The list included things like “write a book of poetry about Thanksgiving,” and “write a story about a mean turtle.” Pretty soon I became more focused on those projects than anything else in class, and a writer was born.