My earliest memories of loving stories were when I was sitting in the light-filled corners of the kids’ stacks at the newly built Northland Public Library in the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, suburbs in the late 1970s. In 1976, my family arrived in the state after my father started a new job. Even before the library collection was moved to the new building from its humbler previous address at what was then called Three Degree Road, the older library was a quiet place of respite for all of us. I have parents who love books and reading. With the new library beckoning, visiting the library became a weekly family outing, yet one where everyone had their own singular experience. Dad probably navigated parts of the library that helped him look up ways to plant successful container gardens on the terrace of our apartment, while my mother was likely browsing cookbooks, as she was in the middle of writing her own. I had no idea where my sister was or what kinds of books drew her attention until much later.

Frankly, I didn’t really know for sure where my family members were because I was rapt. For me, it was storybooks with colorful illustrations that could keep my attention. Crouching down in front of Beatrix Potter and Maurice Sendak books awakened my imagination, and taking in the happy chaos of the illustrations of a Richard Scarry book with all its community bustle and detail excited me. I really loved the one titled What Do People Do All Day?  because it illuminated the lives of other people, albeit “animal people.” The stacks were my favorite places to be safely ensconced in the colors and softness of the kids’ section of the local public library. It was a perfectly communal space for an introvert to grow into herself as a reader. I was five years old. Dad always said that his favorite older brother (Dad was the seventh and youngest brother in a family of 11 siblings) told him when he moved to Europe at seventeen years old, with books in reach, he would never be alone. Dad passed on that sentiment to me, and it stuck.

Stories, then, became my passion, and what followed from that was writing. I recognized early on that I had a precocious talent for reading, and perhaps because it came easily to me, I loved it. Then, by way of that love, soon came a deeper love for and ever-increasing facility with words, in a beautifully self-reinforcing feedback loop. I was determined to understand unfamiliar words — even the ones in my parents’ Reader’s Digest — so I could be welcomed into the minds of different people, but back then I didn’t really recognize that those people were called writers. As I slipped their laminated covers onto the librarian’s checkout desk on Saturdays, I couldn’t have imagined that there was a whole mechanism through which words in a person’s mind found their way onto paper and bound into books and then arrived in my hands. Books were treats. And free treats, at that. The community of being loaned books that other people would later check out was a great thing too — but that essay is a different one.

So, my writer’s origin story is embedded in the endless new worlds one can access through reading, and the magical spark of connection reading offers to the writer, who is the backstage sage and conduit of the story. Unsurprisingly, fiction was my favorite realm as a child. Ramona Quimby books were favorites because I could relate to Ramona’s plight as a somewhat messy younger sister. Later, the solitude and perplexity of Fudge’s experience in Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing kept me endlessly entertained. How to Eat Fried Worms was next on the list and came highly recommended by my older sister, who was three years ahead of me.

I just couldn’t get enough of books. And in a way, I didn’t have to imagine a limit, as long as there were libraries in my life. Our family wasn’t “scrimping and pinching to make ends meet” like Ramona’s, exactly, but we were still a young family living firmly within limits, and trips to the toy store were not as frequent as ones to the library!

Wednesday, like Saturday, became enshrined as another seminal reading day for me. I never missed school on a Wednesday because it was Library Day. Sitting on the carpeted floor of our elementary school library, near short shelves of books, I found myself feeling peaceful and energized and kind of like I belonged, not really with my peers, but with the books. Listening to the librarian read a section from a new book and then being unleashed to choose a library book for the week was a specific type of feeling. I learned about the gold stickers conferred to extra special books, like the Newberry and Caldecott medals. I actually loved learning about the card catalog and felt secure and satisfied in the way books were ingeniously organized so they were easy to find.

One of my earliest memories of those library days is of the determination I had to eventually read my way through all the Beatrix Potter selections. With their small size, which I recently learned Ms. Potter insisted on so that they fit into “little hands,” they gave me a contained feeling. Tiny and manageable books, I loved their all-white covers with gorgeous illustrations of talking woodland animals and quaint bucolic settings. Their peace brought me such happiness. They also brought to mind the Ladybird imprint-published book Downy Duckling, which was a favorite of mine from the days when my family lived in England. I have memories of my parents reading that book to me, and it brought me double pleasure when I subsequently read it to my own kids some three decades later.

Writing children’s books was my first foray into writing — at the ripe old age of seven. Strangely, I was my own audience. I never really shared my books, except with my parents. I fashioned myself a writer because I realized there was nothing stopping me from thinking up stories, illustrating them, and then armed with a stapler and a quick fold to the compilation’s left-hand side, voila! I had created my own books. I made sure to write my name on the covers along with the titles, mainly because I wrote a lot of my own books. One was about an unusually small (the youngest) apple amongst its family, which had a big voice and a lot to say.

It was obvious that I knew I liked to write. My teachers commented on my writing, and when Reading Group became English class as grade school was left behind, it was cemented as my favorite subject. I wrote for school papers, wrote a diary, and did other things writers do, such as read, hone my skills as a fastidious observer, listen for the musicality of words and skillful turns of phrase. In high school, I once asked for a huge dictionary as a Christmas present and chiseled away at expanding my vocabulary. I learned to read peoples’ personalities via their bookshelves like I was reading tea leaves. Over time, I learned what types of authors and writing appealed to me, and I spent a lot of time in libraries and bookstores. I also spent time admiring and romanticizing writers — these people who created such worlds of magic. I was nourished by their efforts and sustained by their offerings.

I was interested in Journalism, but I enrolled at a university which offered no formal degree in it, so I declared an International Business major before I admitted to myself that I would be much happier with a different focus. I switched early on, choosing to major in English (Writing, not Literature) and Communications. When I missed the deadline for submitting an assignment (from the one Journalism class I took) to the college paper, I submitted the same essay to The Washington Post, and they published it. That encouragement spurred me toward more confidence in my writing. I will never forget how I received one or two phone calls at home from people who had read my Op-Ed and thanked me for what I wrote! To this day, I’m surprised that anyone could track me down at home, but they most likely did so via the now extinct Yellow Pages. The connection to other people left me breathless. My words had actually landed somewhere and connected with someone; it was a whole new dimension to round out my love of observing, of creating, of writing.

The connection to readers, for me, I think, is what has been most essential. I am  also captivated by the way I can transmute life events or memories and spin them into something that reflects experience but, perhaps, in new ways; shining light through facets that are built with both factual reality as well as imagination. I still haven’t settled on one genre I prefer, but lately I have been interested in the many ways to tell a truer truth via fiction. There is no doubt that writing, to me, is a form of play and a form of self-therapy, the kind that comes from processing experiences and bouncing them out to the world like a signal into the void, to see if anyone is out there to receive, to connect — to say I see you.

Expecting my first daughter, I found tutoring adults in reading unexpectedly rewarding. My first interaction was with a gentle-voiced man, a little older than I was, who had dropped out of school when he was around eight years old. He had clearly slipped through the public schooling system and had subsequently been in legal trouble, but when I met him, he was determined to turn his life around and was committed to becoming a stronger reader. We became friends. During lessons, we moved through the pacing of the formal system I had been trained in, but at the end of our lessons together, we read for fun, bringing each other into new worlds. He insisted I read him the sports section of the newspaper, and I shared with him gorgeously illustrated poetry collections by Naomi Shihab Nye. We both learned a lot. Because of its place as both a starting point and a bridge, a love and respect for reading has always been the richly tilled soil underneath my passion for writing.

A few years later, when my youngest daughter was born with a life-threatening health condition and needed complex surgery as an infant, I blogged the experience. First, posting on a blog was a way to consolidate updates on her progress without having to email a list of people, or composing individual emails to keep people up to date at a time when every minute was precious. Then, the practice became a way to connect and process what was happening (to whatever degree I could process in the middle of a storm).

Sometimes I found myself in my study both typing updates and pumping breast milk at the same time, with the assistance of a hands-free pump set up. Writing served an important purpose then: documentation, escape, and community because I could see I was connecting with people both known and unknown via reading the comments in my few free moments. The unique reward of sharing my writing spun out in front of me, like a thread of emotional stability: through words posted and the subsequent comments where I would find people on the other side of my experience. Since then, I have blogged, written on platforms both public and private, written a column for a travel website, written technically in the professional realm, written poetry, essay and fiction, and published a short story and a couple of essays online in women’s magazines. I am working on a novel but as yet have not achieved commercial success with my creative writing. I continue to attend writers’ workshops and love the community I find there among other writers.

Somewhere along the way, I heard the declaration that to be a writer you have to Just Write. I grappled with that for a long time. Something told me that this whole business was a lot more complex than to be preceded with the diminutive word “just.” To me, this was the Big Thing: writing was what impressed me so much and made the particular type of magic that spoke directly to me. How could being Beatrix Potter or later, Michael Ondaatje or Jeanette Winterston or Mary Gaitskill or Joan Didion or Amy Hempel, be the same thing as my journaling privately, writing anonymously, or just spontaneously taking pen to paper? No, there was something more to this. There had to be.

Since then, I have come to understand what Just Write means to me. I have taken the phrase back after much mulling it over. Just Write is the discipline to see free or unstructured writing as a part of the journey and to give it the space and respect it deserves in the life of a writer. Just Write is the bravado that declaring oneself a writer takes, before evidence of any traction in the field. As in any creative field, it is the boldness to create something out of nothing and to remain largely anonymous for a long period of time while working without promise or the prospect of any financial compensation. It is the courage to do what lies at the heart of your creative passion.

Just Write is the ability to accept being less precious about the editing and critiquing process, as well as accepting rejection and cultivating persistence as part of the journey. Just Write is understanding that you can do your worst work on a bad day and then return to your desk the next day, knowing that creative work takes time to be generated, and much honing and editing to be polished. It means that a bad writing day doesn’t necessarily mean a bad writing journey. It is realizing that no work is ever perfect or finished, and it is gathering the confidence to share your work with people with the full understanding that some people will be much more critical than generous. Just Write is a writer’s creative ethos: one whose subtext is the idea that creativity takes courage.

Just Write is technical and skills based, but it is also about the sublimation of ego while remaining strategic and hard-working as a strategy toward success, which ironically, takes a bit of bravado and ego, so balance is a goal. Success can seem at first solely about connection, but afterward, it’s also about separating out connection from commercial or financial viability, as a requirement of bringing into sharper focus one’s goal with writing. It is an inner reckoning that must be crossed: what kind of writer is it important to you to be?

Some people say, don’t be a writer unless you’ve determined there’s no other thing you can do. That could be interpreted in a technical way or in a conceptual way. For example, regarding the No Other Thing You Can Do theory: does that mean you have no other skills? Does it mean you’re just not passionate about anything else and you must give it your best, like a boxer being pummeled but unwilling to go down in the ring? It will mean something different to each person. In my case, the channeling of my own creative energies found its way into writing, which has circled back to me like a boomerang and evolved for many reasons. The self-therapy aspect and making sense of the world is one, as well as the particular parameters and restrictions of my life’s unfolding — a combination of reasons. In the end, I am grateful my art allows me flexibility, can be done spontaneously, and a way to document ideas. Meaning that I’m glad my artistic passion is scalable and portable: it isn’t percussionist in a band or a film editor or something that takes a bunch of equipment and can only be done in certain settings.

If I were asked to give advice to my readers at any point on their own paths toward the boldness to Just Write, it would be this:

• Take time to decipher where writing fits into your view of yourself: your lifestyle, your skills, and your passions.
• Recognize that no writers are made without a good footing in reading and some sort of command of grammar and writing structure, but don’t allow yourself to fall for the falsehood that those are the only things that matter. That’s what education (self-education or something more formal — both are good) and editing are for, which take time and collaboration.
• Determine if you aim more to be a journaler and diarist or if you want to set your writing free and bask in the connection possible when you share your work, regardless of the prospect of publication. Knowing this is important, because one writer writes purely for the sake of it, and one writer writes with a smidge more ambition about the whole endeavor and a craving for recognition on some level. Neither is right nor better, just different. It depends on what the artists feel called to do, or on what they doggedly can make happen. Remember, you can change your mind at any point or toggle forward to seeking out a wider audience, but a certain level of public success may mean you can’t toggle back to being “unknown” — see more on the life of J.D. Salinger.
• Understand that rejection is part of the game: world-class rowers have calluses on their hands and prima ballerinas have blisters on their feet. It hurts, but you build tougher skin.

Ultimately, there is a level on which one only has to believe oneself to be a writer, to claim the mantle. There is no precise recipe, no formal club to pay dues to. There are measures the outside world will try to impose on you, to either puff you up adequately or to diminish you. Resilience among these degradations of comparison is important. Imperviousness in the face of the overlaying of opinions is a useful skill. The ability to navigate the antics of the gatekeepers of the publishing world may serve a writer well. But writing, like all art, is a revolutionary act, and it is the action that moves things forward.  The act, for me, has been forged by the gumption and drive to express myself into the world, whether to rid myself of artistic energy or to aim for that energy to land somewhere and connect with someone. And that artistic impetus is something no one can define, so it belongs to everyone — all those who have the will to identify as a Writer and to bear it as I did when I was young: proudly, naturally, and maybe most importantly, without apology.