I’m dyslexic and English is my second language. And I should not be writing books. Not by any metric. But I love words and I love stories. And what I tell children is I found dyslexia to be a strange gift. It’s always made me look at the world a little bit differently. It isn’t just about words, it’s about processing. It’s how you process the sounds you hear, language, mathematics, music. And sometimes things just take me longer but I learn them deep.
I go deep. There’s horizontal learning and there’s vertical learning. And I think one of the things that dyslexia can give you if you stick with it is the ability to learn something on a very profound level.
How do you tell stories? You listen.
I think every writer is influenced by the manner of their birth, the path their life takes, the people they’re exposed to. For me, I’m dyslexic. I’m an audio-dyslexic. I hear phonemes unclearly. Sometimes they’re like the visual equivalent of HD and sometimes they’re like the old zenith television, crrrr, so I read lips a lot. English is my second language. I’m not the kid you would have pegged as a writer, ever. And rightly so.
Why words? In part because I loved sounds. I loved stories. I grew up with Cuban storytellers and southern storytellers. It was a double whammy. How do you tell stories? You listen.