They forced her to clarify for herself what she loves in stories as a reader-to create her own definitition of “good writing” from the inside out.
They forced her to figure out why she writes at all. They forced her to define who she is and what she cares about. Katherine firmly believes that our struggles lead us to our strengths, and the years of not getting published, she’s decided, were good for her. Instead, she began a decade of struggling, agonizing, and questioning the meaning of life before finally finding a fairy-godmother-like agent and getting a dream-come-true book deal for her debut novel, The Bright Side of Disaster.Ī total happy ending. At 22, she won a fellowship to the University of Houston’s Creative Writing Program and moved home to Texas with plans to become Jane Austen ASAP.ĭidn’t happen quite that way. She won a creative writing scholarship in high school, and then went on to major in creative writing at Vassar College, where she won the Vassar College Fiction Prize.
From then on, she was doomed to want to be a writer-obsessively working on poems, essays, and stories, as well as memorizing lyrics, keeping countless journals, and reading constantly. The story recounts the plane crash where the main character from How to Walk Away interacts with the main character from Things You Save in a Fire.New York timesBestselling Author Katherine Center wrote her first novel in the sixth grade (fan fiction about Duran Duran) and got hooked. MORE: Katherine Center’s short story, The Girl in the Plane I’ve never really been able to relate to that component of his personality.” “I’m much more of a curl-up-on-the-sofa-and-read-about-doing-things kind of person. “I’m not really a doing-things kind of person,” Center said. But she’d seen up close what it’s like to be a firefighter - all the gear they have to wear and how dirty and sweaty her husband often was coming back from calls. That’s because Center writes in the first person and likes to try and embody the character whom she’s writing as. “But I didn’t want to write about that firefighter,” she said.
That character’s brief appearance caught the attention of Center’s editor, who implored her to expand on her story. The idea came from a brief scene in Center’s previous novel, How to Walk Away, where the main character is involved in an accident and is rescued by a female firefighter. Michael Hagerty/Houston Public Media Katherine Center poses in the Houston Matters studio with her novel, Things You Save in a Fire.
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