Rowan Hisayo Buchanan
I was a very shy child, as I suppose many writers are. I had a great fear of being misunderstood. My thoughts expressed aloud always sounded strange. This wasn’t helped by the fact that I read a lot and used words that surprised both children and teachers. So, I’d pause before speaking and often, end up saying nothing at all. Or, I’d begin but give up half way through, trailing into silence.
Slowly, I turned these unsaid thoughts into stories. Hesitantly, I showed these stories to certain friends and teachers. Some said they’d felt the exact thing that I’d had. This was a surprise.
Hemingway advised, Write the truest sentence that you know. I wrote down all the true things I knew and put them into a novel. The story was fictional. But the emotions, the way a man laughed, the click of a bicycle wheel, and the way paint bubbled on a wall were stolen from life. Writing will, I think, always be a way of trying to sort out my strange true things.