Few people start out wanting to ever become a writer.
It feels like something you grow into by either a love of reading and words or because you become an expert in a given field and others urge you on.
Either way, it’s amazing to me the number of people happily working in a given field that never had childhood dreams of being there.
The leisure to care about such things is a recent development.
Larry McMurtry grew up the same way.
Funny story about Erickson here saying that he is from Perryton, Texas.
My sister-in-law lived in Perryton at one time. Years later I mentioned something to her about John Erickson and this Hank The Cowdog books I remembered reading as a child.
Before I could finish she said, “Wait. I know him! He went to my church.”
That’s just West Texas for you…
When I was growing up, nobody from my hometown had ever become a writer, had even thought about it, as far as I know. The people in my family and community had struggled through the Great Depression, the disastrous droughts of the Thirties and Fifties, and World War II, and that had left them little time to think about writing anything longer than an occasional letter. Our cultural materials came from New York City, Los Angeles, and London, and it never occurred to us that a kid from Perryton, Texas, could be a part of that enterprise.
-John Erickson, Story Craft (Amazon)
