In today's guest blog, 
Josh Berk --- author of the debut novel THE DARK DAYS OF HAMBURGER HALPIN --- goes one-on-one with... well, himself... on his roundabout road to becoming a writer.
I'm going to interview myself. OK, it's not going to be much of an interview. It's just going to be one question. I get asked it quite frequently so it must mean people want to know it, right? Right. Here goes!
Q: "Hey Josh, did you always know you wanted to be a writer?"
A: No.
Q: Um, can you elaborate? Otherwise this will be a boring interview.
A: You said it would just be one question!
Q: You said it would just be one question.
A: Whatever. Fine. I'll elaborate :) The answer is no. I have always had a special relationship with the written word. (No, not that kind of relationship. We're just friends.) I learned to read when I was really young. My parents still laugh at the time I shocked some houseguests by commenting on a New York Times headline from my highchair. (It was 1979 so the headline was probably something about Jimmy Carter or maybe sideburns. Or maybe Jimmy Carter’s sideburns.)
My parents read to me a lot, probably because they were both librarians and the house was filled with books. I remember spending some as a very young child time making up and writing down stories with my mom on rainy days. One or two still survive, such as "The Princess With Dragon Feet" and "The Turkey That Ate Pilgrims." Classic. Then, as a fourth grader I went through a serious C.S. phase, and did briefly think I'd make a career writing fantasy novels.
But after that period of time, for most of my life I never thought I'd be a writer. Baseball was my career choice from age five until I realized I was terrible at baseball. Which, yeah, if I were paying close attention should have been about age five-and-a-half, but I was pretty delusional. I thought I could make the majors despite not making it off the bench in the eight-year-old league. Writing was not something I thought about much during the next many years of my life. I wasn't good at baseball but I was OK at other sports and through middle school I played sports, I thought about girls and ... is there supposed to be a third thing? Because there was not.
What got me back to the written word was, oddly enough, music. After quitting the basketball team (OK, fine, I got cut!) in high school I joined my first rock band. My friends and I mainly liked the idea of making up band names so we changed our name every day. "Chickens of War," "The Potters of Darkness," "Ernie's Milktime Cavalcade," and a few others I can't repeat. I couldn't play an instrument so I became the singer, despite not being able to sing. This didn't matter. I had to pretty much shout just to be heard over the drums anyway. And even if I couldn't sing, I wasn't terrible at writing. I wrote lots of songs and slowly remembered my love for the written word.
Then, in my final year of high school I took creative writing with my favorite teacher ever, Mr. Shosh. (He's now Dr. Shosh and also he tells me I can call him Joe, but it doesn't feel right.) He encouraged me to write funny stories if I felt like it. He gave me high marks for stories filled with wordplay and dumb jokes and outrageous plots. And he taught me to revise my writing, to work with a story to make it better. He gave us an assignment to secretly spy on people talking and write down their every word so we could learn what real dialogue looks like. He made me love the craft of writing so then when I graduated high school, I went to college and studied ... political science.
Why did I do this? It remains a mystery. I hated politics. It wasn't until graduate school, when I studied YA as part of my library science studies, that I began to think seriously about writing a book. It is scary to decide to try to publish a book because the likelihood of failure is so high. Who wants to enter a field so full of rejection? Could my fragile ego take it? I wasn't sure, but I figured that trying and failing was better than not trying (a simple revelation, but a revolutionary one to me).
My first attempts at writing teen fiction were not successful. I wrote whole books that were rejected and rejected. But I kept at it. And then I had a strange dream and a weird idea for a teen mystery novel about a sarcastic and hefty deaf kid named Will Halpin. And I dared to dream that I was on to something. The book wasn't always easy to write, but it was often fun. I tried to write with the joy and humor I brought to songwriting. I tried to write with the honesty and power of the great authors I read in that YA class. I tried to write with the care and craft I learned from Mr. Shosh.
THE DARK DAYS OF HAMBURGER HALPIN came out in February of this year. Just the other day I saw Mr. Shosh for the first time in fifteen years. He had a copy of my book in his hand and a smile on his face. I'm not sure if I expressed to him how much he meant to my career. Maybe I always did want to be a writer, but it took a great teacher and a terrible rock band to make me realize it.
-- Josh Berk
