One Writer's Beginnings

I learned in the doing how ready I had to be. Life doesn't hold still. A good snapshot stopped a moment from running away. Photography taught me that to be able to capture transience, by being ready to click the shutter at the crucial moment, was the greatest need I had. Making pictures of people in all sorts of situations, I learned that every feeling waits upon its gesture; and I had to be prepared to recognize this moment when I saw it.

These were things a story writer needed to know. And I felt the need to hold transient life in words—there's so much more of life that only words can convey— strongly enough to last me as long as I lived. 

Eudora Welty, One Writer's Beginnings

I was reading the Smithonian and stumbled upon this article about Welty--not only the writer, but also the photographer. I had read and analyzed a brief piece of her work in my AP English Language class for only forty-five minutes, but that was enough to convince me of her great writing. How as a young girl she had to put up with the "dragon" librarian and still kept reading nevertheless. How she became a writer--and also an artist.