I have been writing since I was a very young child, since I learned how to pick up a pencil and write letters. But the first concrete memory I have of writing a story is when I was about six years old and I wrote an episode of Gilligan's Island. Of course, I had no idea that the show had been off the air for 30 years and that I was watching reruns. I showed my mother and she said, in an off-handed kind of way, "Oh, you could be an author when you grow up" and that stuck with me forever. After that, I don't think I saw myself as doing anything else and I don't remember ever wanting to do anything else.
In my novel "Wife Not Required", the main character, Mattie, is hired to deal with a baby who won't stop crying and can't hold down any food. My youngest daughter cried continually for the first two years of her life. It was a horrible screaming type of crying and she cried day and night. If she was awake she was crying - and she never slept longer than a few hours at a time. I would feed her and she would throw up all of her food. My husband and I were so emotionally drained. I used her as inspiration for my novel. We eventually found that she was lactose intolerant and suffered from acid reflux and now that all of that has been dealt with she is the most loving and wonderful little girl, thank goodness!
I would tell myself to write; not to worry about editing and making everything perfect, not to debate and get stuck on a word or sentence for weeks at a time, to write the whole thing and then edit after.
