“I pity writers who do not have sisters!”

Today I am pleased to welcome Samuel Parks to Great Thoughts’ Great Authors.  Samuel is the wonderful author of This Burns My Heart- a lovely book.  My review is here.

Here’s Samuel:

I don’t think I would’ve become a writer if I didn’t have sisters. Quite literally: when I was five years old, before I really learned how to read, I would help my sister fall asleep by reading her stories during her bedtime. We had a book called “A Story a Day,” each page a different story, and I would make up stories based on the pictures I saw. What makes this story even cuter is the fact that my sister was five years older than me, and the one between us who could read.

I had another sister, also older than me (by six years), and I spent much of my childhood watching things happen to them first. From the safe perch of kid-dom, I spent my days observing and idolizing them—to me, their teenage lives seemed fascinating and mysterious. My sisters’ lives were the first ones I wanted to chronicle, their experiences far more intriguing than the ones in Choose Your Own Adventure. And though I have never actually written about them, the experience of growing up around them often made me see the world from a female perspective.

It became a bit of a self-feeding circle: growing up with my sisters (and my mother, of course) made me interested in stories centered around women, and those stories in turn, made me interested in writing about female relationships. Two of my favorite characters in literature are Lizzie and Jane Bennet in Pride and Prejudice—Lizzie, bold and spirited, a perfect foil to Jane, mature and thoughtful. Their relationship is one of my favorites in the novel, and the affection they have for each other feels completely modern to me, and deliciously rooted in reality.  My older sisters, only a year apart from each other, had a very Lizzie-Jane-like relationship, and, as a little boy, I would spend hours listening to them chat.

I pity writers who do not have sisters! Early on in the life of This Burns My Heart, before I found an agent and an editor, I wandered through the wilderness of pre-publication. But my sister helped me keep my spirits up. At the time, I had fallen into the habit of using the back of my manuscript pages as scratch paper, and my sister ran into one such page. They sat by the printer, the typed pages down and hidden from view. My sister, without me knowing, read a few paragraphs of the novel on her own. Later, she told me how much she liked it. Just one page! But somehow it was enough. I don’t know if it was the timing of it, or the randomness of her chancing upon the page, but it made a big difference and made me want to continue working on the manuscript.

I’ve read articles over the years about how people who have sisters tend to, overall, be happier. I can see that. That day when my sister told me she liked my novel certainly made me happy! I often call my sisters when something’s bothering me, and do my best to reciprocate when they need a sounding board. Later, after the book sold, my sisters cheered me every step of the way. Little by little, the book started to have its own life, and a number of sisterly friends also came into my life to celebrate its publication, and toast me virtually on Twitter, or with actual drinks in real life. It is that kind of support that makes the experience feel special. Writers need people to stand by them, to help them, to cheer them on. For me, my sisters have been that support mechanism, calling to congratulate me when I close a foreign deal, ordering my book to gift to their friends. Somehow an accomplishment doesn’t feel real until you see the glow of pride in someone else’s eyes. I have written elsewhere about my mother—my book was inspired by an event that happened in her life. But my sisters have left a special imprint on my book, too—and in my life!

What are you reading and where are you going?