This post was originally published at Novelicious.com and is now at WritingTipsOasis.com. WritingTipsOasis.com acquired Novelicious.com in June 2022.
Liesel Schmidt lives in Pensacola, Florida, where she spends her time writing, drawing, and reading everything she can get her hands on. Here she tells us why Number The Stars by Lois Lowry is the book that has had the most impact on her writing.
My mother is a reader, so I grew up in a house full of books. In fact, most nights when I was little, she would read parts of a book to my sister and I as we drifted off to sleep, whether it was Little Women or The Velveteen Rabbit. As I got older, that love of reading just grew deeper and deeper, and it was something that my parents always encouraged. Over the years, I fairly ate books, going to the library and bringing home massive heaps of books that no sane person could ever expect to read in the allotted time, but I’ve never been quite able to squelch the urge to stack just one more book on my pile!
I met so many inspiring characters in those pages and read so many different styles of writing, travelled to different countries and explored different time periods – I can’t even begin to estimate how much I’ve learned simply from reading. Still, I think that the book that truly had the most impact on me and my connection with writing would have to be Number the Stars, by Lois Lowry. I was actually given the book by my fourth grade teacher, as part of a bag of Christmas goodies she gave to the class on our last day at school before the Christmas holidays. She’d chosen an assortment of different titles to give each child, and I have no idea if she’d chosen this particular book specifically for me, but the story told on those pages was one that sparked an even deeper love of books and a huge interest in that period of history.
I actually still have that book on my shelf, after twenty-odd years and multiple changes of address. It’s outlasted many weedings as I matured and combed over book spines to decide whether or not the titles were ones that warranted the space in my library, especially when I was trying to downsize for a move to a small apartment!The characters that Lowry created in Annemarie and Ellen, their friendship and the danger that they were experiencing, at such a young age, were so powerful to me; and I still remember parts of the story as if I’d actually watched them with my own eyes – that’s how colorful a picture was painted by Lowry’s words. That’s the kind of impression I want to leave with my readers – I want them to connect with the characters and be able to see and feel the stories as though they were actually there. Maybe one day, one of my stories will be the book that changed my life!
Liesel's novel, Coming Home To You, is out now.