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Challenge
Tell us about THE book, story, or poem that changed your life. The one that brought you to love words.
The love of reading, or the love of words is something writers share. Tell us about THE book, story, or poem that changed your life. Give us a synopsis of the piece, with the author and title. If you want to, tell us why we should read it if we already haven't. Only one rule: You can only pick ONE piece. Don't over think it -- pick the one piece that has stayed with you more than the others. We all have reads that we couldn't put down, and some we forged through even though it was painful. So tell us about the piece of literature that stays with you, that sparked your imagination, that made you want to put pen to paper and tell your stories, your words, your poetry. Fellow Prosers- Read through these posts as they (hopefully) come in. Is there a book you've read? Let us know in the comments. One you need to read? Let us know that, too. Let's interact and get a feel for what inspires us to give our words to the world.

Look

I was read to in the cradle. By the time I was three, I had a stack of "Little Golden Books" as tall as myself; I remember Sambo and Hans Brinker and a host of international dolls on parade in those books. At six I read to the others in my kindergarten class and my first novel was "The Bobbsey Twins at the Seashore", followed, at nine by "The Wizard of Oz".

I can't pick one that brought me to words, but the creation of my own words started, one night, in First grade. To that point, I had become proficient at the recognition of printed words and sounds, but hadn't really locked onto the most basic part of word formation.

That day, I had a list of spelling words as homework, one of which was L-O-O-K. Lying in bed, I sleepily mumbled to myself, "Look, L-O-O-K, look." Suddenly, it was a word; a word I had made, myself, from independent letters. 

It opened a world of creativity for me and I've never stopped being amazed by it. My watch words could be "when in doubt, LOOK."

Or just "LOOK"!