It could have been the winter of 1971 (if memory serves) that CBS aired a made-for-TV-movie called "The Homecoming". This was the pilot movie that later became the TV series, "The Waltons". But the movie version actually aired a few weeks before Christmas (as it was a Christmas movie about a West Virginia family during the Depression).
I think the only actor who returned to take a role in the TV version was Richard Thomas, who played "John Boy".
But what does any of this have to do with me and writing? Well, you may recall that in the movie, the father brings home Christmas gifts to give to all of his deprived children. The final gift to be opened was John Boy's, and he discovered that his father had given him a large supply of Big Chief writing tablets. The father says, "I wonder how news traveled all the way to the north pole that you wanted to be a writer?!"
Our family was huddled around the TV watching that show when I was eleven years old, and I turned to my dad soon after that and said, "And I want to be a writer, too."
My dad looked at me as if I had just informed him that aliens had implanted a homing device inside my skull. "It's just a movie," he said. "Nobody writes around here. Just concentrate on detasseling corn or chucking coal over your shoulder . . . you'll be doing that a long time."
Like John Boy, I fell into a deep depression after that . . . but for a writer, depression is often good, and I began writing some of my best stuff: dark stories about hippies getting their heads cut off in motorcycle accidents, or teenagers who fall headlong into detasseling machines, or stories about whole families who are wiped out by a strange fungus that comes from outer space and grows in the grass and they get buried under tons of coal.
About six months later the school principal called to ask my dad to check my brain for that alien homing chip.
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