In the postcript of the audiobook version of Ender’s Game, Orson Scott Card shared the two reasons anyone decides to become a writer.
- You read something amazing and say, “Oh, wow, I want to be able to write like that.”
- You read something awful and say, “If that got published, then I can write.”
The more I think about this the more I think he is exactly right.
Here are just a couple of examples that come to mind:
Example of #1:
When Charlie Holmberg (The Paper Magician) was 13 she watched a Japanese anime TV series, “The Vision of Escaflowne,” and wanted to create stories like that.
Example of #2:
David McCullough (John Adams, 1776, Truman) wrote his first book about the Jamestown flood because he thought he could do a better job telling the story than any other book he had read on the subject.
