What would you like to tell readers about yourself?
Today Abby Bardi will be talking about how she became a writer and what inspired her in regard to the story she's promoting.
* I’m one of those people who have literally always written. My parents used to say I wrote my first song when I was two, and I probably kept that up because they thought it was cute. (I still write songs.) I started writing poetry when I was seven and stories when I was twelve. In high school, I filled a spiral notebook with really terrible poetry and carried it everywhere. In college, I took creative writing courses, where I had some great teachers who were very patient with me—because to be clear, though I was really committed to writing and loved it so much I literally could not stop, I would say in retrospect that I had absolutely no talent. My teachers helped me improve my writing, and over the years I’ve worked really, really hard at it.
* In the course of all this writing, I’ve gotten really interested in technique, in figuring out what exactly makes something exciting, fun, or moving to read. I try to teach students how to do some of these technical things because craft provides a way of expressing all the fascinating things people have inside them. My favorite quote about writing is from the novelist Gustave Flaubert: “Human speech is like a cracked cauldron where we play melodies to make bears dance, when we wish to move the stars.” This is our tragedy as writers, though some of those tunes for bears can be pretty good.
* So how I became a writer was basically by working obsessively on writing for years and years and never giving up because it’s what I love to do, and I love to share that with other people, so I also teach writing.
* The Secret Letters was inspired by a
