When I was 12 (I think), my uncle paid me 20 dollars to type up a paper for his English class in community college. It took me all day: my uncle's handwriting was hard to read and I was using a typewriter, so I would have to stop once in a while to fix a typo. But I loved the subject (one of Shakespeare's plays), the feel of the keys beneath my fingers, and the way the sentences appeared, line by line, turning into elegant paragraphs, and finally into a coherent, sentient organism, a creature that was talking to me. Although I wasn't the writer of the work, I had a glimpse of what it would take to become a writer. It was a pivotal moment for me, when I thought to myself, I will be a writer when I grow up.

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