Ask the Author: Sam Reed
Answered Questions (3)
Sam Reed
Oh, this is a good question! I haven't had a life filled with mystery, which I guess when you think about it is a good thing, lol. But, as a child, I was sick for a while, apparently it was pretty serious, evaded a definitive diagnosis, and then went away on it's own. I think it might be interesting to explore what that mystery illness was, and how it may have affected my life moving forward.
Sam Reed
I’m pretty sure I got started writing by reading. Books were the things that made me feel the most okay. Internally, I felt like a strange kid, I don’t know if I actually was one, but I often felt on the outskirts of things. Words on pages that I could hold were the places where I saw reflections of myself - characters I could relate to, situations I could be invested in, and my reactions were my own - meaning however I felt while reading, was ok. So then, for me, writing became a natural outlet, I felt safe on paper, I felt like the truest me on paper, so writing was where I got to learn myself. First it was just journals, and then, probably again, because of the reading, my crazy imagination started leaking through and it became about telling stories, trying to make sense of things I didn’t understand by giving them fantastical foundations, by writing characters who were strong where I was weak and who lived and saw and grew in the ways I wanted to, or even the re-telling of things, reworking the past into something that if it was negative, would no longer have any power over me, and if it was positive, that could be made gloriously larger, worth sharing and celebrating. So I guess, if boiled down to the basics, for me, writing started by not just falling in love with words, but in realizing I could trust the world words allowed me to live in and create.
Sam Reed
Write. That seems like easy throw-away advice, but it’s the truth. Just be sit down and write. Commit to it like you would anything else. You’ll see things that say write everyday, and that’s good advice, because as a concept, being a writer is romantic and artsy but that makes it easy to forget that it is also a job; one that requires some dedication and routine. You must write to be an author, you must write enough words to make a book, and most likely you’ll have to be able to do that over and over again. That said, I don’t write everyday, sometimes I can’t, the words just won’t come, and so I don’t beat myself up about that. I take it as a day of inspiration, I look around me, I pay attention, I watch people, I think things out. Then when I get back in front of the page, that bank of ‘prompts’ will help the words come…and when they do, it’s usually a long winded tumble of things that need to be edited and rearranged and completely reworked and that’s ok, the most important thing is to just get it out - get the words out, then as you start to work with them and mold them into a story, they’ll work with you, it’ll be a partnership and that’s when the magic happens.
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