Each book has been a different writing experience. 'Making up stories and characters is so interesting that I'm never bored. As her family grew and her children started to read, she began to write books for young people and, fortunately for her readers, discovered that there was more to being a writer than sitting in front of a typewriter. Byars started writing articles for The Saturday Evening Post, Look,and other magazines.

She was bored, had no friends, and so turned to writing to fill her time. She and her husband, Ed, had moved there in 1956 so he could attend graduate school at the University of Illinois. The writing career didn't emerge until she was 28, a mother of two children, and living in a small place she called the barracks apartment, in Urbana, Illinois. Even then, writing was not on her immediate horizon.įirst, she married and started a family. My father wanted me to be a mathematician.' So Byars set out to become mathematician, but when she couldn't grasp calculus in college, she turned to English. I would wear smashing hats, wisecrack with the guys, and have a byline known round the world. If I was going to be a writer at all, I was going to be a foreign correspondent like Claudette Colbert in Arise My Love.

You sat in a room all day by yourself and typed. not one single teacher ever said to me, 'Perhaps you should consider becoming a writer,'' Byars recalls. Betsy Byars began her writing career rather late in life.

The computer nut by betsy byars