Amy Holt

Amy Holt

I started writing because of health problems that made sitting in a recliner feel like work. I learned that sitting in a recliner all day only sounds like fun if you don't really have to do it. Actually, sitting in a recliner never sounded like fun to me. Riding bikes, playing catch or hiking sounded like fun, even vacuuming or laundry sounded like more fun to me than sitting in a recliner all day. So after months spent sitting, well, more like laying, I was crazy with boredom.

Boredom can lead you to do things that are completely out of character; for me that was writing. Why in the world would I try to write a story? I didn't even enjoy reading. It had been incredibly difficult to learn to read. The simple sight words that everyone else learned overnight would get mixed up in my mind. Words like "went" and "when" or "then" and "there" were harder to decode than ancient hieroglyphics. Reading meant carefully deciphering each word on the page hoping I could make sense of the individual words when I finished the sentence. More often than not I had to reread multiple times to understand what I read. It's enough to make anyone's brain hurt.

Even though I'd gotten much better at reading, writing and spelling it was not super fun for me. Of course, neither was sitting around bored so I started reading a few books. What I really loved to do during my lonely hours was make up stories. Somehow that led to writing them down. It has been a long road with lots of failures, but somewhere along the way I began to love writing and enjoy reading. Now, a day rarely goes by that I don't do something related to writing.