Female Novelist

I've been writing non fiction for years actually and but secretly I wanted to be a novelist. When I first started writing at the age of thirty was with the intension of writing a fiction. But I took a long detour and for ten or twelve years and wrote non fiction which I absolutely had no regret about it at all. I think it exactly the right thing for me to do. But that was that dream took away and side of me to do this. Now I remember reading something that Eudora Welty wrote, who is, you know, the great novelist who has a big influence on me actually, and she said 'No art ever came out of not risking your neck. And I think she is absolutely right about that. It doubts that way to me at that time and it actually 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 the novel called 'The Secret Life of Bees'. I wrote it in 1992 and it is actually an essential the first chapter of the novel, as it is now.