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?

-- Submitted Anonymously

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>.

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