I have been writing non-fiction for

I have been writing non-fiction for years, but secretly wanting to be a novelist. When I first started writing at the age of 30, it was with the intention of writing fiction, but I took a little detour for 10 or 12 years, and wrote non-fiction which I absolutely have no regret about at all. I think it's exactly the right thing for me to do. But there was that dream tucked away inside of me to do this. Now I remembering reading something that Eudora Welty wrote, who is a great novelist from Missisippi who had a big influence on me actually. She said, "no art ever came out of not risking your neck." And I think she's absolutely right about that. It felt that way to me at the time, it actually feels that way every time I sit down to write something. Finally, in the early 90s, I took my deep breath, and started writing fiction. It felt risky to me at the time to do that. And one of the very first things I wrote was, what I thought was going to be the first chapter of a novel, called "The Secret Life of Bees". I wrote it in 1992, and it is actually essentially the first chapter of the novel as it is now.