…Philip Pullman has said that your life begins when you are born, and your story begins when you discover that you have been born into the wrong family by mistake.

But when does the life of a storyteller begin?

Mine began when I was about six. Up until then, I had half-believed that my mother could read my thoughts. But at some point during first grade, I realized that I was completely alone in my own consciousness. I used to regularly freak myself out by sitting still, closing my eyes, and asking myself the same question over and over until I was in a sort of trance. The question was, How am I me?

What I meant was, How did my particular self get in here? Again and again, I would close my eyes and plunge myself into this existential angst. Why did I do it? I think that, like someone alone in a dark room, I was feeling around for a door. Because I really, really did not want to be alone in there.

And I did find a door, eventually. The door was books.

When I read books, I wasn't alone in the rooms of my own mind. I was running up and down other people's stairs and finding secret places behind their closets. The people on the other side of the door had things I couldn't have, like sisters, or dragons, and they shared those things with me. And they also had things I did have, like feelings of self-doubt and longing, and they named those things for me.

Take Meg, for example. In the first chapter of A Wrinkle in Time, she calls herself an oddball and a delinquent, makes a horrible face at herself in the mirror, and complains that she is "full of bad feeling." All of this was a revelation for me.

The people in books told me things that the real people in my life either wouldn't admit or didn't realize I needed to know in the first place. And the more I read, the more I thought about writing my own stories, with my own kinds of truth in them. By the time I was nine, I knew I wanted to write. But I didn't tell anyone, because it was too wild a dream. Instead, I told people I wanted to be an actress, which I thought was much more practical, and I waited. I waited about twenty years. Meanwhile, like a lot of people who secretly want to write, I became a lawyer.

Then one day it dawned on me that it's difficult to become a writer without ever writing anything. So I began to write short stories, and I worked on those stories for years until the universe intervened by telling my three-year-old son to push my laptop off the dining room table. No more stories. And suddenly the whole secret writing dream felt very worn out. I asked myself why I had ever wanted to write in the first place.

And then I remembered that door, and what I had found on the other side of it, and I began writing again. But this time, I was writing for children.

...I was halfway through the first draft of the book when I became afraid of it. There came a moment of doubt: was I really going to pour all of my inner weirdness into this book? Was I losing my story, or finding it? I wasn't sure. By the time my fortieth birthday rolled around in January 2008, I had stopped writing the book.

A week later, I went to a writers' conference where Laurie Halse Anderson spoke about craft. Her talk was called: "Plot vs. Character: Cage Match Smackdown."

It was a great talk, and at the end of it, Laurie spoke about fear. She told us that sometimes you just have to stop thinking and write.

"Don't think. Write." I drank these words down like an antidote... I walked out of the meeting room, opened my computer, and created a new folder, called "don't think." In that folder, I began writing my book again, and this time I managed to get to the end without worrying too much about exactly what kind of a book it was...

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