Deniz Eldam

I started making things up before I started reading. Writing came much later.

The first book I “read” before I could read was my father's Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. He'd sit me in the reading chair, lower the dictionary — almost as heavy as I was — into my lap, and let me open it to whatever page I liked. My skinny legs would go numb under its weight, but I never once complained.

“This is a book about words,” my father would say. “It tells you what words mean.”

I loved this idea. A book that explains words… Wow. It seemed wonderful that the world held so many words. When I grew up, I decided, I would write a book that explained words too. Its first word would be çikoçikiçi·ko·çi·kinoun, childhood inventionChocolate that never runs out. Has a long, secret recipe for how it's made.. Çikoçikiçi·ko·çi·kinoun, childhood inventionChocolate that never runs out. Has a long, secret recipe for how it's made. means chocolate that never runs out. I even had a long, secret recipe for how to make it. Children would never again be left without chocolate.

Then I started school. School is a terrible place — the kind of place that makes you forget you were going to write a book about words, forget your recipe for never-ending chocolate.

It took me forty-five years to unlearn what school taught me, and to remember that I wanted to write a book. I was thoroughly confused in the meantime. I tried ballet, then piano. Becoming a manager. Making a lot of money. Those were fun too, but once it occurred to me again that I needed to explain words, I bought myself a great many pens and a great many notebooks — and a chair, not unlike my father's reading chair. These days, I write stories. Writing is exactly as beautiful as I imagined it would be, back when that dictionary sat in my lap. And even now, all these years later, preparing my third book, accepting that trying to get your writing published will never be an endless bar of chocolate is still just as hard.