I’ve been an avid readers since I was in the third grade. I was usually the first in my class to get my work finished, so I was able to sit on the red and blue rug in front of the bookcase and choose a book to read. That was probably my favorite part of the day, and it resulted in a life-long love of stories. This was long before I imagined creating fictional worlds of my own, which didn’t occur to me in any real way until I was getting my BA degree in English. By nine years old I had discovered the joy of stepping into worlds someone else had imagined. 

These were days when reading instruction meant practicing phonics, reading aloud in class, and answering questions at the end of each chapter to show that we understood what we had read. I was lucky that reading came naturally for me (my mother insisted that it was because I watched Sesame Street) and  I found the right books at the right time. 

I read a lot of books during those formative years, but the ones that stand  out to me are Beverly Cleary’s novels. Looking back now, I can see that one of Cleary’s greatest gifts was her ability to treat ordinary childhood as something worthy of literature. There were no epic quests or magical kingdoms, although those can be fun. In  Cleary’s books there were neighborhoods, schools, siblings, scraped knees, misunderstandings, and the wonderfully complicated emotions that accompany growing up. Ramona Quimby wasn’t extraordinary in the way fictional heroes often are. She was impulsive, imaginative, occasionally frustrating, and endlessly curious. She made mistakes, misunderstood adults, and felt things deeply. As a child, I didn’t analyze why I loved those books so much. I simply knew that Ramona seemed like someone I might have known. She could have been any of the students in my class. Beverly Cleary showed me that ordinary lives could contain extraordinary stories.

Around the same time, also sitting on that red and blue carpet, I encountered Charlotte’s Web. I think I must have read that book ten times because I’d finish it and then turn back to the first page because I wasn’t ready to leave Wilbur and Charlotte behind. It was the first time I realized that a book could make me feel such tenderness toward fictional characters or that it could leave me joyful and heartbroken by the final page. E. B. White trusted children with important questions about friendship, sacrifice, love, and mortality, and he wrapped those themes in a story so engaging that I didn’t notice how much I was learning about the world around me. When I finished the novel, I felt as though I were saying goodbye to dear friends. That’s why I  kept returning to the beginning. 

What I was learning, even if I didn’t realize it at the time, was that books offered the chance to inhabit another person’s life. As a child, I only knew that for a little while I had stopped being myself. I had walked through someone else’s neighborhood, stood on someone else’s farm, celebrated someone else’s victories, and mourned someone else’s losses. Somehow words printed on a page had transported me into another time and another place, and I always brought brought back a little piece of it back into my own world.

I think this is why I still love books above all else. A film shows us a character’s face, a painting captures a single moment, and music expresses emotions in a way that is different than words, but the language of books jumps right to my heart in a way nothing else does. Looking back now, I realize that third grade marked the beginning of my lifelong conversation with books. Of course, I had no thought then of writing my own books. I was simply captivated by the extraordinary experience of caring about people who existed only in my imagination. Every trip to the classroom bookshelves or the school library felt like the beginning of another adventure. Every book promised another opportunity to become, for a few precious hours, someone else.

Now when I begin a new novel, I still want to disappear into another world so completely that I lose track of time. I want to make friends with characters who linger in my thoughts after I’ve closed the book. I want to emerge having seen life from a slightly different perspective. The genres I read have changed over the years, from children’s literature to classics, historical fiction, literary novels, and Gothic tales, but the magic remains exactly the same.

When I think about that third-grade girl carrying Beverly Cleary novels and Charlotte’s Web home from school, I don’t imagine that she knew those books would shape the course of her life. She wasn’t dreaming about publishing novels one day or any kind of literary ambition. She simply loved stories. She loved disappearing into them, lingering there, and reluctantly returning to the real world when the final page had been turned.

I’ve always felt like those of us who are destined to write books develop that desire from a love of books. We can only ingest so many words before we’re compelled to start spilling some back out. Maybe every writer truly begins with falling in love with reading. Before we can tell stories, we must first learn how deeply they can move us. Maya Angelou said that words are things as tangible as an object you can hold in your hand, and I agree. Words have the power to remind us that every life has a story that is worthy of being told. For me, that lifelong love affair began with a little girl named Ramona, a thoughtful spider named Charlotte, and the wonderful realization that between the covers of books, entire worlds are waiting to be discovered.