toni morrison quote

Inspiration: Words make a difference

People often want to know if I wanted to be a writer my whole life. The answer to that question is no.

“If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.” –Toni Morrison

These are the words that made me a writer. My story is that simple. I am a lifelong voracious reader. I read everything. I would read every word on the cereal box while I ate breakfast as a child. It never occurred to me that I could be a writer. Writers were special, crowned in glory, gurus on the mountaintop. I was a reader.

Until the day when I realized that if I wanted a different story, or a different ending to a story, or a different character in a story, that I could make my own. Despite people telling me that it was impossible to get published, I wrote a story. I didn’t write it to be published. I didn’t write it to be rich, or famous, or get followers on social media. I wrote it because I thought of it, and the characters began to feel real to me, and then I didn’t want to leave them hanging, unliving, almost alive. I worked for a year just to do a thing.

The thing that I had done, with the oblivious confidence of the absolute beginner, was to write the book that I wanted to read.

That book was FALLEN.

Fallen