Read whatever it is you want to write, read poetry, read children's lit, read nonfiction. YOU MUST BE READING AS MUCH AS YOU POSSIBLY CAN IF YOU WANT TO BE A WRITER. READ AND WRITE!Īre you reading enough? If you could possibly read more, than you aren't reading enough. What if I don't provide you with the right answer and you give up on your dream? What if I tell you to do something, but it's the wrong answer for you? With all of this responsibility hanging over my head, I feel that the best thing for both of us is to keep it simple. The next morning, I looked over what I had written and realized it was the best thing I had ever written. I got up, wrote the first chapter of IHHBWM and went back to bed. I woke up shaken and depressed still, but also inspired. She knew that if he had just been with her, he would still be alive. During my recovery, while I was still an outpatient, I dreamed that I was a girl whose friend had died. I was severely depressed, so much that I was briefly hospitalized. What made me write IHHBWM? My first novel had been rejected again and again, and I was giving up hope that I would ever be an author. I'd caught the reading bug though, and it never left me. They redrew district lines, and I moved to a different school where I had lots of friends from my neighborhood in my class. No one would be my friend, but no one would make fun of me anymore, because I would just pull out my book. I discovered that if I concentrated on reading, I wouldn't hear them mocking me, and my lack of reaction took the fun out of teasing me. I made a few friends in my neighborhood, but none in my class, and halfway through the school year, the girls decided that I was to be mocked and ostracized. That year, my family moved from a small town in Arkansas to St. I was a slow and reluctant reader until I was 9 years old.

Laura nowlin author