Author

People often ask me when I started to write. Just as was the case with my acting, which began at age 3, the writing began early. I have diaries going back to age 12 or so, poems that began at age 7, and I clearly remember writing, illustrating, and binding my first book at about age 4.

But writing doesn't just happen - it requires consistent effort. The Muse visits often, and we must take it from there, or risk losing Her inspiration.

Through the years I've always written poetry, some of it the form of lyrics. Along the way I've had some spectacular teachers.

There was Miss Wren in 4th grade, who used to put the entire week's assignments on the blackboard, giving us the choice -- and requiring we develop the skill -- to schedule our own time. I remember a boy named Dicky in my class who came to school Tuesday claiming to have finished all the homework for the week on the first night. "Do you know everything in the universe?" Miss Wren asked. That sent him back to his books.

There was Mr. Downs at ASIJ - the American School in Japan where I spent most of grade school, all of Junior High, and half of High School. An inspiring and deeply caring man, he had high standards, and it wasn't so much in the choice of words as in the quality of thinking.

One of my best teachers never taught in a school. He was Mr. Shibata, the editor-in-chief of the Mainichi Daily News -- the English Language edition of one of Tokyo's major metropolitan newspapers. At age 14 I marched into his office asking if I could have a job. He roared with laughter. I stood my ground. When at last he agreed I could cover a press conference, he went over my manuscript with me in detail. "This is a very nice essay," he said, "But it's not an article. In journalism, this is how we do it." And over the next 3 years he gave me a "Masters" in journalism while I made my way through Junior High. The many articles I wrote got better thanks to him, and my crowning achievement for the Mainichi was a series I wrote about a trip through the USSR my father and I took, from Siberia through Moscow and Leningrad. That world is gone now, but captured in those early pieces, thanks to Mr. Shibata.

Then there was Lucia Baker Owen (I'm allowed to call her Lucia now, because we're grown-up friends.) Miss Baker, in those days, was one of the saving graces of my years the Connecticut boarding school St. Margaret's. When a student stood up to recite a poem by Shelley, Miss Baker called out "Keats, baby, Keats!" to correct her. How cool can you get? It was Lucia Baker who first encouraged my use of metaphor, and to this day my best friend Erin calls me "Miss Metaphor." I wrote Lucia a thank you note last year...better late than never.

Then there were the amazing minds at Bennington College. Bernard Malamud. Nick DelBanco. Claude Fredericks. Alvin Fein, under whose tutelage I wrote my thesis. There was Bill Dixon, the great musician and composer who taught classical Black music. He taught me a lot about being an artist, thus affecting not only my music but my writing as well. After all that, if I'm not a good writer, I have no excuse.

Ten minutes after I graduated from Bennington I moved to New York and within two weeks had landed a job at the Financial Times of London in the New York bureau and learned what it feels like to bite off more than you can chew. But thanks to colleague Candice Cuniberti, bureau chief Guy DeJonquieres, and U.S. editor (we used to call him the USED) Jurek Martin, I became a bonafide journalist the hard way -- I earned it. I still enjoy great friendships with my friends at the FT, one of the world's truly great newspapers. That paved the way for work with the Associated Press working for the great Bob Johnson, Managing Editor. Amazingly, I worked alongside the men I called the A.P. Space Kings covering the Apollo Soyuz mission at NASA -- the youngest reporter on assignment, and an honor I've never forgotten. And I had a great run as a freelancer, writing cover stories for Rolling Stone. articles by Mara Purl

It was just a matter of time, though, before I had to get back to my theatrical roots, and writing scripts was a perfect compliment to my return to acting. My script The Meridian Factor was optioned by Fox and later I turned my attention to creating my own Soap Opera.

Now I focus my writing efforts on books, and nothing has ever been as challenging, nor as satisfying.

Some of the book writing I do in collaboration with my spiritual sister Erin Gray, and wow, what a joy it is! Together we've found a joint writer-voice which doesn't sound like either of us, but does sound like both of us. Our ideas spark, my fingers fly across the keyboard, and we chuckle exuberantly as the pages flow. Our first book is "Act Right" and we're working on our next one now, "Audition Right," an unavoidable outgrowth of the first. And we have several others that have already been in the works for several years.

Most of the book writing is what I do solo on The Milford-Haven Novels. This will be a series of 12 books...so you know I'll be busy for a while. The first three novels are doing well and nothing means more to me than the comments I receive from readers! Take a look at some of these comments and read more about the novels. Milford-Haven has become a very popular and well-known world of its own which beckons me often to return to its compelling shores.

Occasionally I take time to write essays, one of my favorite things to do, and I thought you might enjoy sharing some of them, so here they are.

If you have comments, I await breathlessly to hear them! Write me at mara@marapurl.com. If they're interesting I'll even post them here for others to share.

If you're a writer, let me tell you this from the heart: write, and keep writing. Never stop. That's what my mentor and dear friend Louis L'Amour told me to do. I'm still listening to his advice....

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