In the second grade something important happened to me. It was time to write my first book. One of my favorite TV shows was “Gilligan’s Island,” but it always troubled me that the people shipwrecked on that island were never rescued. My book told how Gilligan and Mary Ann had gotten married, had two children named Gilligan junior and Mary Ann the second. Then it explained how they built a little boat and sailed to safety. I also drew pictures to go along with the words.
This book was followed by another book, a take-off of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. My second grade teacher read that particular book to us in school, but class got out for the summer before she could finish reading the book. I was so curious as to how the story ended, that I went home and made up my own story. Again it had lots of pictures, but each one was accompanied by a line or two of writing. My version of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory had chocolate people running the factory.
The flood gates didn’t burst open though, until I was in fourth grade. Before then my writing was confined mostly to school assignments, but in fourth grade we had a substitute teacher who gave us an assignment to write a murder mystery. To me that sounded a lot more fun that answering questions in writing or diagramming sentences. For the hour that the teacher gave us to write a murder mystery, I wrote page after page of a story explaining how I killed the plumber when he came over to fix my sink. It was a gruesome story--not much of a mystery--but I had just found my niche in life, writing.
Coming Tomorrow: Book of Mormon Stories
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