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.