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What made you want to write? Did you ever not know what you would
do with your life or aspire to be something different than what you eventually
became?
OSC REPLIES: - February 1, 2001
I wanted to be everything as I was growing up. Doctor, soldier, scientist,
philosopher, teacher ... in high school I would read through college catalogs,
imagining myself in every major. I entered college as an archeology major. But I
soon gravitated to theatre -- that's where I was spending all my time, so I might
as well major in it, even though it would lead to no career in particular. I started
writing because so many scripts were so very bad. I would "fix" bad scenes and
rewrite weak acts, and adapted several narrative works for readers theatre
presentation. I saw a play based on a Book of Mormon story - a story I loved, and
the play handled it, I thought, very weakly. So I started adapting scripture stories
into plays, and wrote a few original ones, too. People got a lot more excited about
my playwriting than my acting or directing or scene design or makeup or
costuming, so that's what I kept doing more of. Ultimately, though, I realized that
I could not actually make money as a playwright, and I wanted to be able to marry
and have a family. So I turned to writing science fiction because (1) I read enough
of it to have a clue about how it was done and (2) it had a short-story market that I
might have a chance to break into. The rest is, if not history, then a footnote to a
footnote in history <grin>.
QUESTION: