Your resume isn’t exactly what one might expect for a writer. Tell us how and when you began reading and writing.
Well, I began reading very early. I started reading in part because my older brother read to me when he was stuck babysitting me; he was twelve years older than me. And one day, I remember, he stopped reading because my parents came home, and he was off; I wanted to finish the book, so I took it down and finished it on my own. It was White Fang . I was four. Now, I’m not saying I managed every word, but I managed enough to be able to finish the book and understand what had happened, what was going on. By the next year, I was reading well enough that I did understand every word of Huckleberry Finn , and Tom Sawyer , and From the Earth to the Moon , and that was the year I decided I wanted to become a writer. But I didn’t write anything then; I knew I didn’t have anything to say. I knew when I was a teenager that I didn’t have anything to say, and when I was in my twenties I didn’t have anything to say. I became an engineer; I was injured quite badly, spent a month in the hospital—a full month recovering—and I decided then that life was too short.
What kind of books inspired you first to write?
Well, in a way, it was the three I mentioned— Huckleberry Finn, Tom Sawyer , and From the Earth to the Moon —those are the first books that made me decide that I wanted to be a writer, books like that, write books like that one day. I will not mention the book that actually made me start writing, because it was a matter of tossing a book across the room, because I was stuck in bed and grumpy, and saying, “Oh god, I can do better than that!” And of course when you’ve said something like that, you have to put up or shut up, so I made my effort, and…here I am.
More than put up!
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