On Becoming A Writer

Whenever I'm asked how I got into this business, I've always claimed I didn't know I wanted to be a writer. Oh, I was an avid reader, but writing? Well…that was something that never crossed my mind. This all changed recently when I was putting together a keynote speech on a subject very dear to me: creativity. I was thinking back over my life, searching for the creative moments that changed me, moments I could use to drive home my point. It was then I realized the writer was inside of me for all those years, just trying to get out, hidden, yet there in everything I did that was creative, anything that triggered my imagination.

There is one particular childhood memory that brought this reality home to me with razor-sharp clarity. Around the time I was seven, I can remember jumping off the roof of the garage because I wanted so badly to feel what it was like to fly. This was not a one-time trick. (It does, however, explain my bad knees and triggers the question: Where was my mother?)

But seriously…what I can remember most was not landing on the grass or the driveway, but the feeling I had the moment I stepped off that roof—that I was freefalling. Not a single part of me was touching the earth. I remember stiffening all my muscles really tight, as we did in ballet class, and for a mere instant, I felt as I had stopped in midair. I wasn't falling. For that instant, I was flying. I was a bird.

I think it was Natalie Goldberg who said, "It takes a while for our experience to sift down to our consciousness." It took fifteen years of claiming I wasn't born to be a writer to realize that I was. Inside of me is an innate need to explore the things: things I don't know; things I don't understand; things I have to say to the world.

I'm very lucky that the writer in me finally "sifted its way into my consciousness." For the past fifteen years I have been writing stories about human experience, fictional stories, some grounded in reality and history, and others grounded only in my imagination: Come in and see what I see. Come hear what I hear. Welcome to the lives of the people who live in a Jill Barnett world. Watch them deal with life. Watch them win or lose.

Interview any writer and he/she will tell you the question we hear most is, "Where do you get your ideas?" And I think most writers, like me, will tell you that the ideas never come from the same place, or come at you in the same way. Our ideas come from who we are, from our individual and unique views of life. The ideas are innately "us." A writer's vision comes from inside his or her own truth.

I write toward my own truth, because it's there, inside of life's truths, that I can learn something about me, about mankind, about who we are and what we want, where we are going and why. I try to celebrate the human spirit, to remind us that we are an amazing race, that we have the ability to learn, forgive and change, and that we should strive for the joy in our life as we struggle through the hardship and sorrow.

One of the greatest gifts we have as writers is to be able to move from the everyday world into one of our own creation, where we get to play God, fate, and destiny, and every once in a while, we get to slip a piece of ourselves inside a story. So you are welcome to come along with me into the worlds I must bring to life--those between the covers of a book. You see, I have to write, because I was born to it.

JILL BARNETT grew up in Southern California, spent summers on her grandparents farm in Texas, far away from bestsellerdom. She now resides with her family in the Pacific Northwest. She sold her first book to Simon and Schuster in 1988 on 35 pages and an outline, and has gone to write thirteen novels and five short stories. There are over 7 million of her books in print. Her work has been published in 17 languages, audio and large print editions, and has earned her a place on such national bestseller lists as the New York Times, USA Today, Washington Post, Publishers Weekly, Barnes and Noble and Waldenbooks —who presented Jill with the National Waldenbook Award.