As a child I was a voracious reader. In the third grade I think it was (it bothers me that I can’t remember what year it was, though I remember the shape of the classroom) there was a reading contest. In a two week period, the child who read the most pages would win a giant ice cream sundae with as many different toppings as he wanted.

Of course, I won. Just as I would win the paper airplane throwing competition (twice)! later in that same year (and that was even after I taught everyone else how I made mine). Just as I would win Battle of the Books in sixth grade - though, other people (namely my team) helped. I ate that sundae, and though it was a simple vanilla enterprise merely topped with chocolate sauce and sprinkles, it was something I’d gotten out of hard work. A reward for reading.

Why, as we grow, is this something we lose?

In middle school I borrowed tens of books from the library at a time, reading through all of the YA that interested me (Bruce Coville - who I wrote a letter to and who responded personally, encouraging me to keep writing , Paul Zindell, Jane Yolen) until I found Stephen King, who I liked enough to read just about everything he’d ever written. I admired his fortitude, his ability to keep looking forward, even if his last book wasn’t very good. The thing he seemed to understand was that you will always write bad books, but that you have to slog through them to be able to write good ones.

I kept reading on into high school, well after I knew I wanted to be a writer. That I wanted to be one of the writers kids like me got attached to, who answered letters, who created worlds for imaginations to inhabit.

Then something happened. I’m not sure what it was. Maybe I got a girlfriend, in the eleventh grade. Perhaps it was my family’s habit of getting together in the living room to watch television from 8pm till about 11 every night. Whatever it was, I stopped reading. Books were no longer escape, they were work. Reading one book would take weeks, months, if I finished it at all. I’d stopped writing.

Then, I’m not sure about the timetable, but sometime during my high school years my parents sat me down and told me they were concerned. Why was I no longer writing? And I hadn’t really thought about why, I’d just assumed it was a natural progression. When you were a child you imagined things, pretended you could be what you wanted to be , but as you grew older you left those things behind, because they weren’t realistic. But my parents showed me with their concern that writing was something they really wanted me to succeed at. It wasn’t just a hobby anymore.

And so, that November, I started work on my first real novel - a story about a man who wakes up in a world where everything has lost its detail, color, and taste. He has no memories of his life besides some meager clues, and in his journey to find out what has gone on joins forces with a small girl who keeps growing rapidly older and he rapidly younger the closer they get to the source. They fight zombies and reach the end of the book as two people of the same age - and the man finally remembers that this woman was his wife before things went wonky.

The book was a fantastic failure. A failure in the sense that the story sucked. Fantastic in that I’d slogged through something bigger than I thought I’d be able to ever make, on guts and determination alone. On two hours every day. My girlfriend wasn’t very happy with me, but I think she understood. It was something I had to do to get my mojo back.

At orientation for Michigan State, which is a program called AOP, I met my future English advisor, Ruth Mowry. She was the first person who simply met my eyes and nodded when I told her I wanted to write novels. For her, it was a reasonable goal for me to have. Something about that meeting, the matter-of-factness in which she accepted my career path solidified writing for me. It wasn’t just something I could secretly believe I’d be - it was something I could tell people with a straight face.

My freshman year I wrote another novel, or tried to. I got about halfway through before realizing I wanted to write something bigger, with grander scale. Once again I’d found myself with the same problem - how do I build a world for the reader when my only main character doesn’t understand how that world works? But already I could see I was improving. My writing became more fluid, more understandable. I no longer left things out to make my fiction seem mysterious.

The summer between my freshman and sophomore years I attended a week-long writer’s workshop taught by Orson Scott Card in Virginia. This was instrumental to my current mindset as a writer - I learned that function, over form, was the riding factor in good fiction. Storytellers will trump writers every time. This was new to me - before, when I’d turned to resources for advice on writing, I was pointed again and again to Strunk and White’s Elements of Style (even by Stephen King, whose On Writing praises that little style guide) and when I picked up a copy, expecting to find the secrets to creating little packed up worlds for people to ingest, I found myself severely disappointed that it was about word choice and usage.

In Virginia, Orson Scott Card said, “[Strunk and White] have killed more writers…” He trailed off, and I took this to mean “than they’ve birthed.” Card preached plot, character, and above all, relationships.

Relationships. Not the culling of unsightly adverbs.

And so we had a night to write a short story, and we spent the last two days workshopping. I wrote a time travel story about a boy in rural Virginia in the 1940s who goes to his basement to find a naked black man hiding there. The man says he’s a time traveller, and the boy gets his daddy. His daddy gets up a posse, and has the man lynched. Years later, the boy sees a story in the paper about a physicist who’s just won a grant. He recognizes the man and goes to join him as an assistant, all the while never speaking of the fact that as a boy he saw his boss dangling from a tree. As the testing of the time machine becomes imminent, the grown boy tries to sabotage the whole thing but ends up sending the black man back in time, thereby causing what he’d been trying to prevent.

I was satisfied with this story as a one-night effort. And I felt like it would be well-received. It was, for the most part, except for a few who didn’t understand the time travel element (these weren’t all readers of Science Fiction, just aspiring writers - most ten or twenty or thirty years older than me). Card told me my story was predictable, and harped on my usage of the name Gary for a black man. He also proposed a switcharoo - make my main character paint himself black and go back in time to take the scientist’s place. Hang in his stead. Which seemed like a brilliant idea to me at the time, until I tried to implement it and came up with zero ways the main character could make himself look like Gary enough for his child self to later recognize the man in real life.

I didn’t care that The Man Himself didn’t like the story all that much - it was a throwaway effort at best. The important thing was he had weighed in on something I’d written. Me! The author of Ender’s Game and Speaker for the Dead had told me personally what he thought of something I wrote. Not to mention he also said I was the perfect age and had the right look to be one of the older officers in the EG movie (but that’s beside any relevant point - I just thought it was cool).

Looking back, I didn’t agree with all of the writing advice he gave. He basically told everyone that he’d only ever had to send out rough drafts, and that they’d always been published. There was nothing in his technique regarding revision. I dispute that. Also, I could think of no reason why Gary couldn’t be a believable name for a black man. I can think of, off the top of my head, maybe five or six prominent African American men named Gary.

Gary Sheffield, Gary Coleman, Gary Payton, Gary Matthews Jr. (of the Angels).

That’s only four, but I think my point is well made. Did they want my Gary’s name to be blacker for a reason? Must we give in to racism as realism?

I don’t know where I wanted to end up with this post. It started to be about needing a reward to finish a book, and the way spending two or three hours reading nowadays feels like “wasting your life.” Maybe this has to do with the internet, where everything is instant gratification. You want it? Well you can have it now. Nobody has to work for a payoff. Nobody has to read 2200 pages for that final thrust of genius to puncture their hippocampus.

So I’m going to be reading more. Reading = writing. Neither of these have any room for television watching, except in spare hours when my brain craves to idle harmlessly, on Hulu.

I’ve found myself in a place I never thought I’d be in when I was twelve, and typing that timid letter to that intangible force who had conjured Rod Allbright and his alien friends from nothing. I’m returning there, to that well of imagination. The escape that came so easy and was just as easy to forget about as the problems of living in reality were no longer occluded by the safety of childhood. And I don’t need a reward - my reward is finding out where my words come from, and why, and how to make them keep coming, forever.