Before I liked to write, I liked to type. I remember visiting my grandmother Adele in Ponce Inlet, FL when I was three years-old, and she had an electric IBM typewriter. I thought that this electric typewriter was about the most fascinating toy in the world - I liked the little bell and the sounds and the feel of the keys and especially the erase key. Grandma Adele would set me up with plenty of paper and I'd be entertained for hours. I would type pages and pages, mainly nonsense, but sometimes my name or lists of words I knew. When I went back home, my parents let me use their typewriter, which was not nearly as good as Adele's - their typewriter was neither electric nor did it have an erase key, and the keys were very hard to press. I'd get a blister on my forefinger from all the hunt-and-pecking. Furthermore, the ribbon was always ripping and messy to change. But I typed on this primitive beast for a number of years, and that was when I first started to write stories. I can't remember when the nonsense changed into something more organized and story-like, it just did. (Will the monkey eventually type Shakespeare? Not as yet.) The first stories I wrote were autobiographies, because, at that age, I found myself a most intriguing subject. Still, the autobiographies were largely fictionalized. I'd sometimes leave space for illustrations and sew the pages together when I was done. And for many years, this was the extent of my fiction career.
When I was around eight, I learned how to touch type at school, and I received a computer as a present… I started writing plays and for many years, I thought I would be a playwright. Over the years, I had studiously managed to write everything but novels - I had been a copious pen pal, a first-class transcriptionist, a professional screenwriter (still am, actually), a teen music reviewer, a mediocre research paper-writer, and of course, a writer of plays. So, although I was not writing novels, I was always writing something. Actually, I hadn't ever felt any particular calling to be a novelist, and I clearly remember telling a friend of mine about six months before I started work on Elsewhere that I would NEVER write a novel.
And then I thought of the idea for Elsewhere, which did not seem to want to be a play or a screenplay. It kept sounding awfully novel-ish in my head and though I was a little scared, I just sat in front of my computer and started to type. So it was fortunate that I liked typing, because I would be typing Liz's story for many a moon.
Although I still write screenplays, I've written two other novels since writing Elsewhere. And I'm happy to report that I still like the sound of the keys.
February 2007, The pug and me in Santa Monica for the Independent Spirit Awards.
