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What made you want to write? Did you ever not know what you would do with your life or aspire to be something different than what you eventually became?
OSC REPLIES:
I wanted to be everything as I was growing up. Doctor, soldier, scientist, philosopher, teacher ... in high school I would read through college catalogs, imagining myself in every major. I entered college as an archeology major. But I soon gravitated to theatre -- that's where I was spending all my time, so I might as well major in it, even though it would lead to no career in particular. I started writing because so many scripts were so very bad. I would "fix" bad scenes and rewrite weak acts, and adapted several narrative works for readers theatre presentation. I saw a play based on a Book of Mormon story - a story I loved, and the play handled it, I thought, very weakly. So I started adapting scripture stories into plays, and wrote a few original ones, too. People got a lot more excited about my playwriting than my acting or directing or scene design or makeup or costuming, so that's what I kept doing more of. Ultimately, though, I realized that I could not actually make money as a playwright, and I wanted to be able to marry and have a family. So I turned to writing science fiction because (1) I read enough of it to have a clue about how it was done and (2) it had a short-story market that I might have a chance to break into. The rest is, if not history, then a footnote to a footnote in history <grin>.