About a week ago, I received a letter from a fan. It said, “Henry, how did you know that you were supposed to be a writer?”
That wasn’t the first time someone had asked me that question. In fact, it’s the second most common question people ask me – The most common question I get asked is: “Henry, how did you get to be so handsome?”, which isn’t surprising considering the number of mirrors I keep around the house. But yeah, many have asked me how I’m sure that I should be a writer. And for all the times I’ve been asked that question, I’ve never bothered to come up with more of an explanation than: “Well, I just sat down one day, wrote about five pages and then I just knew.”
That’s not a lie. That is really how I made that decision. And I had never thought anything more of it, until I received that letter and it finally prompted me to come up with a better answer. So, every night for the past week, I’ve been hammering the question at my brain, getting frustrated because every answer I came up with lacked the necessary sincerity.
Until yesterday, when I saw a young boy playing in the sand-pile near some roadworks. He was muttering all sorts of stories to himself, acting them out with sticks, and it hit me. That young boy used to be me. That boy didn’t know that he was supposed to be a writer, yet he made up stories. He thought he was supposed to be a professor because that was what the teachers told him he would be. He didn’t understand why some of the parents forbade their children to play with the foreign kids. He didn’t know about the Berlin wall. He didn’t know correct grammar. He didn’t know a lot of things but he never lied in his bed racking his brain for weeks to come up with the answers.
Dear fan who wrote me that letter,
I guess what I’m trying to say is. I don’t know why I’m supposed to be a writer, the same way that young boy grew up without having all the answers. All I can tell you is that, sometimes, the boy in my heart reaches out to me with a small fist full of sand and asks me to tell him another story.