Natalie Blitt
Young Adult & Middle Grade Author
FAQs
Well, I assume there'll be more questions. Not sure what, but stuff folks want to know?
01
Did I always want to be a writer?
Nope. Not even close. I wanted to be a ballerina for a long, long time. In 4th grade, I learned to do long division and I wanted to be a mathemetician and just do long division all day. Apparently, that's not all they do... I wanted to be a teacher, a feminist therapist, a midwife, the Prime Minister of Canada, a famous radio journalist, a children's book editor and more and more and more.
But the truth is what I really wanted to do is be a writer. I was just too scared to try because what if I sucked at it? What if the thing I wanted most of all was something that was well out of my grasp?
Luckily, while I managed to hide from my dream of writing, I had some very good friends who wouldn't let me hide for too long. One of them -- the fabulous author Laurel Snyder -- told me one day to stop telling her the stories I wanted her to write and write them myself. And that's what I did. (I love you Laurel!)
02
Is The Distance From A to Z my first book?
Yes! How lucky for me, I got it perfect my first time out.
Sigh. No. I wrote a ton of short stories. True story: I didn't let other people read my stories for a long time, I would only read it to them. I was tiresome. But then I decided to write a novel. And I worked so hard on that novel. But I was terrified that people would read the novel and think that it was about me. (It wasn't. OK, maybe a little bit.) So I spent a huge amount of time trying desperately to hide the real me from the book. That didn't end well. Let's just say, I have a filing cabinet drawers full of drafts of that one.
Between disaster book and A to Z, I wrote three other books. Those are books I believe in, and I hope you'll get to read them one day soon.
03
Did I read a lot when I was younger?
I have spent my entire life reading. When I was younger, I was obsessed (no, I'm not exagerating) with The Little House on the Prairie series. My first writing in fact wasn't LHoP fanfic, but rather corrections on mistakes I found in the TV series. I kid you not. One day I'll post a page out of my diary where I recorded them.
I also loved Anne of Green Gables and Trixie Belden (way better than Nancy Drew) and any love stories I could find. There was a great series called The Keeping Days that I swooned over a lot, in addition to all the Noel Streatfield books, and any book that had a little heart or a girl dying slowly but bravely. I didn't read much fantasy or science fiction (apart from the Doctor Who series and I only read them because I had a crush on a boy who liked them -- I know, terrible reason).
The only time I stopped reading was when I had read every book I wanted to read on the children's book store shelves (I'd just sit in front of them and look at books one by one for hours). I hated the idea of moving to the adult section. How were you supposed to find anything? I stopped reading for a while then, and it sucked.