You could be, like, a writer.

"Write a book," my brother said from his comfy spot in my new Ikea lounger across the living room. "Just write a book already," he repeated, as it is was the obvious solution all along.

"Seriously, Jen, what is it you want out of life?" he asked.

"I want to be a literature professor, I want to open a dance-slash-exercise studio for women, and I want to write a novel."

"Okay, so start with the one that's the most attainable."

I didn't have a PhD, I wasn't a professional dancer, and I definitely wasn't a professional writer, so I really wasn't sure which one he was suggesting.

He continued on as if I had smacked my hand against my forehead and proclaimed, "OF COURSE!" "If you write for an hour a day," he advised, "think how fast you could write a book."

"Write a book" seemed to be my brother's answer to all of life's tough questions. He had been saying the same thing to my mother since he discovered that she was hiding a 20-year-old manuscript up in the attic. Nevermind that our mother wasn't a writer, never had been, and the manuscript was probably 50 pages in total double-spaced. He believed finishing her "book" would solve all her financial problems, let her quit her job, give her closure with her dead mother and may even help her meet a sophisticated businessman who loved to travel to live out the rest of her life with. IF ONLY SHE'D FINISH THE BOOK.

"You're sitting on a gold mine," he'd tell her, "If only you'd finish the book."

I wanted to tell him to sit down for an hour every day and try to write a novel and see how easy he thought it was then.

Besides that, I wasn't a writer, either. I got my degree in literature, which you would think would mean that I could write, but really, all it means is I can read. The only things I have experience writing about are those things that I read. To actually write something creative that was worthy enough (and long enough--good gracious!) to be published was a whole new ballgame entirely.

Go ahead and disregard the fact that I'd been writing since I was six, typing away stories on my aunt's commodore 64 all summer long, stories about stealing freshly baked banana cream pies and taking adventurous walks in haunted forests, then printing out my literary masterpieces on her tractor-feed printer paper, proudly creasing and ripping the edges off before stapling the multiple pages together. It's astonishing that I, a writer with so much experience, a multiple-time Young Authors Award winner, was now, in her late 20s, cowering at the idea of writing a novel, not when I had had so much promise.

But it was true, as sad as it was. When I became old enough to be self-conscious and when my teen years started to resemble fantasy fiction more than actual life, my creativity disappeared with my pigtails and different-colored socks.

A whole ten months passed before my brother brought it all up again. My grandfather had just passed away and I had written an essay to read at his funeral, my own little eulogy of sorts, a last chance to say all the things I've always wanted to say. Well, it turns out most of the family got a chance to read it a whole two days beforehand because my proud mother, who believes everything I write is pure gold, e-mailed it to all my aunts who then forwarded it onto my cousins. The night before the funeral when we were all gathered for his showing, family members kept coming up to me saying how wonderful my speech was before I even had a chance to speak it. My brother's girlfriend even had already read it, to which she commented, "You could be, like, a writer."

"Thank you!" my brother belted out, throwing his hands into the air. That was only what he had been trying to tell me all along.

So fine, you win. Here I am, giving it a try, testing the waters to see if I'm any good at this writing thing and whether or not my brother was right all along.