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Shannon Hale was looking through some old classroom assignments from her fourth-grade year recently when she came upon an essay about what she wanted to do when she grew up. Her goal? "I'm going to be a writer. I'm going to write books."
Chances are, a lot of 10-year-olds think the same thing. And, like Hale, most of them realize at some later point that it's probably not going to happen. Saying "I want to be a writer" was like "I want to be a princess," Hale says now. "It's one of those things people just don't do."
So she hid her passion from the world, claiming in college at the University of Utah that she was an English major because she wanted to become a teacher. "I felt foolish. I didn't talk about it," Hale said. "You'd have to be crazy not to think you're crazy to want to be a writer."
But she kept reading. And writing.
The Goose Girl, Hale's first novel, came out of a pact she made with a fellow fantasy lover in grad school. They agreed to each write a novel between their first and second years of the program. Neither succeeded, but Hale came up with the idea to write a book based on her favorite fairy tale from childhood.
The traditional story, about a princess who uses her ability to speak to nature to reclaim her stolen heritage, felt "incomplete" to Hale. It had the structure of a novel, but much was left out. She fleshed the narrative into a vivid retelling of nearly 400 pages.
Several years and many drafts later, she finally found an agent and got it published. She was...