How I Became an Author by Ana Lim

Hi Story Room writers,

“My middle school years were some of the most arduous times in my life. My parents had just recently divorced and my mother and I had just recently moved to a new town on the outskirts of Seattle. There I was enrolled in a new private school.

So many things were changing, but so was I. I had just turned 12 years old. Honestly, I couldn’t believe my parents were separating. Yet, I saw it more as a temporary vacation from the busy city life of Seattle.

It was summer and I longed to be with my old friends again, so I decided to write letters to them. I guess you would call it…having a pen pal, as emails were not even a thing yet. I wrote to them weekly, telling them goofy stories and things I would see in the Mount Rainier National Park. Where I lived there wasn’t much I could do as a kid, so had to find things to pass the time. I had no video games like other children did at that time, playing the saxophone would infuriate my mother, and drawing would only come to me in rare moments of inspiration. While writing came to me more naturally, but only once I got that first sentence out of course.

In eighth grade, I was randomly assigned to a Creative Writing class, and I had no clue what that would entail. But my curiosity took over me and I gave it a chance. My interests back then were mostly music and art, but unfortunately, those classes were already taken. So I dove into the writing class since I had nothing to lose and everything to gain from it. Long story short, I slowly broke out of my shell and made new friends who shared similar interests. I fully immersed myself in the class and all of its assignments. Looking back, it was perhaps the only way my mind could escape the hectic life I was going through at the time and enter a whole new world.

While others in my class doodled and gossiped, I just wrote away at my short stories, usually sticking to weird and fun stories. Creating these new worlds was much easier than painting with a brush or playing an instrument. Simply I never wanted an idle mind during that manic year and it worked.

My high school years went by fairly quickly and it was pretty non-eventful in the grand scheme, and unfortunately, my writing was placed on the back burner during those years. Once in college, I was not sure what career path I wanted to pursue, and honestly what nineteen year old is. Yet, in my second year of college, I decided to major in political sciences. While looking for “filler” classes one semester, I spotted a children’s literature class and for some reason, it caught my eye. Even though the rumor among my classmates was that the class was immensely easy and not worth taking, I decided to enroll anyway. Once I started taking the class and seeing the passion my professor had for the subject somehow reinvigorated my passion for writing again. Never did I consider writing as a career path until that moment. Before I knew it, I took 10 semesters of these classes, which was enough to get a minor in children’s literature.

My family was a studious lot, always pushing me into more known lucrative career paths. In the end, my passion won me over and opened new avenues that I didn’t know existed, I guess I was naive back then. Now, this may be silly but the book that started it all for me was The Scarecrow of OZ by L. Frank Baum. Of the dozens of books I read in college, this particular book always stood out for me from the rest. His writing was so imaginative, he truly knew how to immerse his readers into his magical world with whimsical characters. This to me cemented the idea that words on a piece of paper hold so much power over us, giving us the ability to take us out of this reality and escape into another.

My book A Gnome’s First Day of School came to me one evening while reading to my daughter. She loved all things creatures and mythical stories of old. Greek mythology was her weekly passion for years. Reading stories about Hercules and his adventures along with the gods, who created daily havoc on the Earth. Knowing my daughter’s palette I wanted something in between, a world that is gentle yet keeps the mythical side alive and well, The world of gnomes just popped up to me as wholesome yet mischievous. These attributes that my daughter would find enticing to read. Being a huge R.L. Stine fan as a child, I understood the fondness of strange things with a good story.  I want to continue telling stories about such creatures and wonders that bring in magic into this mysterious universe.”

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