Secret Life of Bees

I had been writing non-fiction for years actually, 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 have absolutely no regret about at all. I think it was exactly the right thing for me to do. But there was that dream tucked away inside of me to do this. And I remember reading something that Eudora Welty wrote, who is the great novelist from Mississippi, 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. And actually it feels that way to me 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 that 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.