What’s your origin story?

Every superhero has an origin story. Peter Parker has his spider. Jessica Jones has that car accident and those spilled chemicals. And Squirrel Girl … actually, Squirrel Girl was born that way.

But my point stands. We all have events in our past that helped shape us. They may not have given us a healing factor or a surprisingly useful tail, but they did make us who we are.

A friend says her latchkey childhood is what made her the television  devotee/walking encyclopedia that she is today.

A school acquaintance turned the loss of a parent into a driving need to achieve in a truly staggering lineup of academic and extracurricular activities.

My husband says one of the turning points in his life came when he was 10 and he picked up a copy of his mom’s boyfriend’s book Robots of Dawn by Isaac Asimov. It led to a lifelong love of reading and a curiosity about the people and places around him. (It also led to an enormous private library that I’m lucky to share with him; more on that some other day.)

As for me, I’ve recently been pondering what turned me to the fiction writing life. (Oh, lordy, have I ever typed a more pretentious phrase than “the writing life”? Please bear with me.) Other than a lifetime of reading every book that landed in my lap—or on my Kindle, these days—I can point to two events that made me a writer.

First was my seventh grade teacher, whose comments on my pioneer-era creative writing assignment were glowing in their encouragement. If Mrs. L. thought I had a gift, then maybe I did. Plus, I was an obedient, praise-seeking first child, so of course I basked in her kind words.

But those words were easy to push aside when the demands of college and picking a major and a job and then grad school intruded. I didn’t revisit the purely creative side of my writing until NaNoWriMo in 2013. That year, I finished my first novel. It…wasn’t very good. (What’s up, urban fantasy with a feisty female protagonist?) But it was done. And I set my creative writing aside again until the following November, when I wrote the earliest draft of what became Tempting Talk, the first book in my Beau Couer series.

The difference that year was that when Dec. 1 hit, I kept writing. I tweaked. I edited. I  rewrote and polished and rewrote some more. I joined RWA. I went to writing workshops. I started to educate myself on tiny little details like “plotting” and “conveying internal character dialogue” and “goal, motivation, conflict.” You know, the small things. And I haven’t stopped.

So. There’s my writerly origin story. What about you? What event or person or irradiated animal bite made you, well, you? If you’re rocking a full, lush squirrel tail, please let me know.