My life is full of ghosts – those of my grandfather, father, and uncle, all of whom wanted to be writers. My grandfather sailed from Ireland and became a Boston shoe salesman instead. My father was a stockbroker in New York City. My uncle, however, was a copyright lawyer who became a well-known writer of young adult and children’s books. John Donovan also became the Children’s Book Council president, “a non-profit trade organization dedicated to encouraging the literacy and the use and enjoyment of children’s books.”

Throughout my childhood, John would send books. I breathed them in like air – adventure stories, science, nature books, biographies. I would smell the books, rest my head on them, open their pages with awe, escape the real world into theirs.

When my father was dying, I stole the manuscript of the only novel he’d ever written. It was belly-up rotten. Huh? He had three Ivy League degrees. Didn’t matter; he had no talent. What he did have, and what shocked me, was a barely veiled starry-eyed love for a Malaysian woman he’d met while selling car tires there before he met and married my mother.

To understand why that was so surprising, it must be understood that my father was the type of Bostonian who begged its cliché: conservative, unemotional, inexpressive. In short, uptight.

My uncle, on the other hand, loved books, theater, dance, film, writing. Once he told me that he had fallen in love only fifty times. In short, he thrived.

While my father expressed no emotion, my uncle emoted often. Was there a tie between expression and talent? The biggest complaint my father had about me was that I was too emotional.

Was I? In third grade, I read the dictionary for fun. I wrote my first book – of jokes – in fourth grade. Throughout childhood and high school I wrote and directed plays, bribing siblings and pals to perform them at the grown-up cocktail parties. I started writing picturebooks when I was in my teens. I received triple A+’s on my English assignments, which praised my imagination but implored me not to write “this way” in college, to instead follow the rules.

Off to college I went, led by my emotions. I wrote as much as I could, exactly the way I wanted to. By graduation, I had become a big fish in a little pond. I had published poetry. I learned how little that mattered the instant I arrived in the big pond known as Manhattan. Flapping around like a fish far from water, I finally landed work in a small advertising agency. Then a bigger one. I wrote copy. And copy. And copy.

During that time, my father fell ill and died. My sister was diagnosed with a fatal illness. After her young life ended, I quit the copywriting job that paid my bills while it bankrupted my spirit. I left Manhattan for Montauk, the far end of Long Island, and dove into the artist’s life.

Er…the starving artist’s life. It was winter, I knew nobody, there was no work to be found. After a year writing it, and the next year trying to sell it, I sold my first young adult book. It didn’t make me rich, but I got legs out of it – (mostly) positive criticism, attention in Publishers Weekly and The New York Times, workshop gigs at writing conferences, public readings.

I joined a local writing class. I couldn’t help it, my pen would lift as if possessed, and I would edit people’s stuff. When fellow scribblers began offering to pay me for that, I started an editing business.

While I wrote my second novel, I became a ghostwriter. I worked with doctors, lawyers, Indian Chiefs. That’s a fib – about the Indian Chiefs, but it’s true to say that psychoanalysts, teachers, furniture makers, all wanted to be writers. So did ophthalmologists, dentists, bankers. Let’s not forget the entomologists, painters, and mechanics.

Finishing my third novel, I started a writing workshop. Writing is lonely; I longed to be around other scribes who were grappling with issues that can inhibit the creative process: Is this book any good? Should I go to law school? Are 26 rejections too many? The calls started coming in – some the kind I was used to, but increasingly, developing into something else.

As it turned out, a lot of contractors on Long Island’s East End wanted to be writers. They wanted to tell their tales of leaving places like Manhattan for places like Montauk, working at the homes of the doctors and lawyers and Indian Chiefs who had left places like New York City and bought houses on the East End so that they had somewhere to write their books.

The contractors wanted to write stories about the same clients who were now calling me with woeful tales about how their contractors were simply not returning their calls inquiring when that kitchen redesign, living room expansion, or guest house addition would finally be finished. Who could say? The contractors were busy talking to me.

My father’s words rose up like ghosts: Are we all really writers, or are we all just too emotional?

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Stacey Donovan’s website is donovanedits.com