Nobody made me want to be a Writer

I just happened on a blog post by Neil Gaiman.  I do not actually know who he is - except that others interested in the fantasy genre seem to assume everyone will know him.  Well, I suppose it is because I read only for work now.  Writing is my pleasure, my outlet, my need.

Anyway I started to read through a speech this Neil Gaiman fellow gave to the Mythopaeic society a few years ago and had just posted to his blog.  He begins by describing how he encountered the Narnia books.  Then he writes:

C.S. Lewis was the first Person to make me want to be a writer.

I stopped there and had to come in here to write my reaction to that statement:

Nobody made me want to be a writer.

I can remember quite clearly the first thing I wrote - an essay actually - and I wrote it because I had to, not because I had read some other writer's work that inspired me.  I don't mean it was a school assignment; I do mean the thoughts that found their way onto a yellow lined pad of paper in pencil, just had to come out of my head. I wrote many essays in those years - the first being when I was 13.  I also wrote poetry, and tried a few [very bad] novels.  I wrote one absurdist play that my High School English teacher thought superb.

But I wrote because of an inner compulsion to write - it was a need.

It is a need.