The Reader Who Became a Writer

How a lifetime of reading shaped everything I put on the page

I learned to read early. Not just books, but everything. Road signs. Cereal boxes. The back of shampoo bottles. If there were words somewhere, I was reading them. Language felt urgent to me before I could have articulated why, like it was a code I was determined to crack and keep cracking.

In eighth grade, we rented a house from a woman who left behind boxes of romance novels. I read through most of them that year. They weren’t what anyone would call literary. But they taught me something essential: story moves. Readers follow emotion. A book that makes you feel something has already done most of its job. Those novels were my first real lesson in pacing, and I didn’t know that’s what I was learning.

By high school, I spent most of my free time in the library. Not because I had to. Because I wanted to. Because the library was where the world opened up.

The books that built me

Laura Ingalls Wilder showed me that small lives contain enormous stories. Little House on the Prairie was one of the first books that made me understand that the ordinary, a hard winter, a first day of school, the smell of bread baking, could be the whole point. I carry that with me every time I write a quiet scene.

And then there was Seven Alone, the story of the Sager children making their way along the Oregon Trail after their parents died, seven kids holding together through something that would have broken most adults. I was so taken by it that my sisters and I wrote a play based on the book and proceeded to coerce every neighborhood kid we could find into performing it with us. I didn’t have a word for what I was doing then. Now I do. I was adapting. I was storytelling. I was already a writer, I just hadn’t figured that out yet.

I was a horse-crazy kid, and books fed that completely. Misty of Chincoteague and Black Beauty were constants, books I returned to the way you return to something that feels like home. There was something about the bond between a person and a horse that I couldn’t get enough of: loyalty that didn’t need words, trust that had to be earned. I think those books planted something in me about the way relationships are shown rather than told.

Animals could break your heart too, and I learned that early. Where the Red Fern Grows and Algonquin: The Story of a Great Dog were the kinds of books that stay lodged somewhere tender long after you’ve closed them. They taught me that love and loss belong in the same story, that you can’t really write one without making room for the other.

Jack London took me somewhere wilder. The Call of the Wild and White Fang were raw and elemental in a way that felt different from anything else I was reading. London wrote about survival and instinct and the natural world with a kind of ferocity that I found completely absorbing. He also made me feel the landscape, the cold and the silence and the vast indifference of it, in a way that has stayed with me as a writer.

Historical novels were where my love of history took root and never let go. Gone with the Wind, which I first read in middle school, struck me with its scale, the sense that a story could hold history and heartbreak and an entire world inside it. The Last of the Mohicans is one I have read several times, drawn back by its landscape and consequence, the feeling that where a story happens is never neutral and that the land itself carries memory. These books made history feel inhabited rather than inert, full of people making impossible choices under the weight of their moment in time. That is still what I reach for when I write.

The Outsiders cracked something open. S.E. Hinton wrote it as a teenager, and I read it as one, and something in that transmission felt electric. She was writing about loyalty and class and the way the world sorts people into categories they never asked for. I read everything else she wrote after that. She taught me that young voices can carry serious weight, something I think about constantly as a teacher watching my students find their own.

Tolkien and Rowling gave me mythology and belonging, the sense that story could build a world complete enough to live inside.

And somewhere in my childhood, there was a book about children in Sweden solving a mystery. I barely remember the plot. But I remember the feeling of it, the specific texture of another place rendered so precisely you could almost feel the air. That feeling never left me.

The book that changed how I write

Elizabeth Kostova’s The Historian was the first time I consciously recognized what writers can do with place. Kostova doesn’t use setting as backdrop. She uses it the way other writers use character, with intention, with interiority, with consequence. Istanbul, Oxford, the monasteries of Eastern Europe, they aren’t where the story happens. They are the story, in a real sense. The atmosphere is load-bearing.

Reading The Historian gave me language for something I had always felt but couldn’t name: place as character. I took that idea directly into Anywhere But Here. New Mexico isn’t the backdrop of that book. The red chile, the wide sky, the river, the particular quality of light in the high desert, they do the same work any character does. They shape the people living inside them. They hold memory. They pull.

What the classroom taught me about reading

When I came to my current school, I started as the reading specialist. My students were the ones who struggled, kids for whom words on a page weren’t a code they’d cracked yet, kids who had learned to hide how hard reading was. I ran literacy nights to bring families in, to make the case that reading at home matters, that it starts long before a child ever sits down with a textbook.

That work changed me. The kid who read cereal boxes for fun was now sitting across from kids who dreaded the page, and somewhere in that gap was everything I needed to understand about what reading actually costs some people, and what it means when it finally opens up. You don’t take literacy for granted after that. You don’t take a single willing reader for granted.

Teaching changed how I read in other ways too. When you put a book in front of a teenager and watch what happens, you learn things about that book you never noticed when you were reading for yourself. You learn which lines land and which don’t. You learn what confuses people and what reaches them without any help at all.

I’ve watched students who claim not to like reading lean forward for S.E. Hinton. I’ve seen a kid who barely spoke all semester write a full page about a single paragraph in a novel that caught something true about his life. That’s not a small thing. That’s what books are for.

Being in that room, watching young people encounter literature, sharpened my own instincts as a writer. I started asking myself the questions I ask my students: What does this sentence do? Why does this scene matter? What would happen if I cut this? The classroom made me a more deliberate reader, and deliberate readers make better writers.

The reader is still there

I still read everything. Not just books, but signs, labels, the fine print. The habit never left. But now I read the way a writer reads, with one part of my attention always on the seams, always asking how it was made, always stealing something useful.

Anywhere But Here exists because of every book I’ve read since I was a child, the romance novels in a rented house, the horses and dogs who broke my heart on the page, the seven Sager children I once tried to bring to life in my front yard, the wild landscapes of London and Cooper, the ones I pressed into students’ hands, the one by a woman named Kostova that finally showed me what place could do on a page.

Writers are always, in some way, writing back to the books that made them. This is mine.