Guest Post: A Reading Writer's Dilemma

A Reading Writer's Dilemma

By Elysa Hendricks

When I was young, before I started writing (more years ago than I care to remember or admit) reading was my greatest pleasure. I was never a physically coordinated child. Team sports and board games (no computer stuff back in the Dark Ages) didn't appeal to me. So I spent my free time lost in the fictional worlds of Heinlein, Clark and Asimov. At some point, probably in my mid to late teens, I discovered romance novels and I was hooked. Harlequin, Rosemary Rogers, and Kathleen Woodiwiss introduced me to the world of dashing heroes and imperiled heroines, love and sometimes sex. I devoured the short contemporary Harlequins and immersed myself in the long historicals. At that time, since most science fiction and fantasy was written by men for men there was little to no "romance" included. My, how times have changed.

For a long time reading was my escape from the real world, a place I could go where the good guys and gals always won, a place where I could forget about bullies, babies, and bills.

When I was in high school I took a creative writing class and fell in love with the process of putting the people that lived in my head on paper. For a short, extremely short period of time, I thought about becoming a writer. But back then the only career that involved writing, at least according to the teachers at my school, was journalism. So in college I dutifully majored in English. I suffered through numerous journalism classes before I realized that I HATED having to write nothing but the facts.  Somehow it never occurred to me that I could write books without having first been a reporter. It seemed like every novelist I read about started as some kind of reporter, so I gave up my dream of being a writer and got a "real" job.