Author’s Note: The K-8 school my kids attend recently devoted a whole day to the importance of reading. Speakers came in to read stories and tell tales. I was one of them, in what became a kind of career-day seminar for the middle-school set. I was asked to discuss how I got started as a professional writer and what it’s like to be one. Here’s what I said.

My five-year-old son has no idea what I do for a living. As near as he can tell, I spend the bulk of my time in a basement office, staring at a computer screen, and occasionally talking on the phone or typing. He probably wonders why I don’t do something more interesting, such as play computer games, because that’s what he’d do.

At any rate, he came home from school on Tuesday and told me, in his best matter-of-fact voice, that he wished I was a police officer.

I’m not a cop, of course, and so my son’s dreams of bragging to his classmates that his dad can arrest their dads won’t ever come true.

But I have written about cops, and one of the most rewarding experiences I’ve had as a writer came from a story I wrote a little more than four years ago.

Who remembers the Washington snipers? It was a scary time. Everyone was nervous. Parents and principals kept their kids indoors, even on nice days. The snipers shot and killed ten people before they were arrested and put in jail. Thank goodness we don’t have to fear them anymore.

Shortly before they were caught, a Virginia state trooper stood watch outside a preschool that my kids attended. He was the father of a student at the school. My wife came home and told me how his presence had comforted her on that day.

Unfortunately he died just a few hours later. On the way to a crime scene, he was killed in a traffic accident. Except for his death, I might never have known his name, which was Mark Cosslett. When I learned about what happened to him, though, I did what I often do: I dropped everything and did my job, which is to say that I wrote about it. I put together a little essay about how my family, during the sniper attacks, was looking for a hero and how it had found one in this man. My magazine posted it on our website, nationalreview.com. I wish it hadn’t been necessary to write this essay, of course. But Cosslett’s death was a grim fact and so I did write about it. I heard indirectly that his widow appreciated the effort. Cosslett also left behind two little kids. One day, when they’re older, maybe they’ll find the article on a Google search and read a little bit about their dad, a man they never got to know. For me, that would be reward enough. Then came a big surprise. A few months later, at a memorial service for police officers who had died in the line of duty, President Bush read from my essay. You can Google that, too. This story highlights one of the great things about writing: the readers. You can write something personal and on the spur of the moment and for all you know it will be read and talked about by the leader of the free world. I don’t mean to suggest that President Bush sits in the White House waiting for my latest dispatch from Woodbridge. The only thing I know for sure is that one of his speechwriters read my article and thought that referencing it would serve a useful purpose. My point, however, is that when you write in our day and age, you’re potentially talking to the whole world. It’s a power and a privilege that you can experience in few other professions. How many of you have thought about being writers? I was exactly your age when the idea of writing for a living first occurred to me. A few things inspired me to think about it: I won a writing contest at my school, an English teacher told me that when I grow up I should write for a magazine, and I found myself composing little stories about a cockroach named Kenny for the amusement of friends and family. It wasn’t until high school that I became really serious about writing. The immediate cause was a basketball injury. In the 10th grade, I was trying out for my high-school team. These were competitive tryouts but I had no doubt about my fate because I was a decent player. Shortly before the final cuts, however, I mishandled a pass and jammed a finger worse than I’d ever jammed one before. My finger was broken. A doctor ordered me not to touch a basketball for six weeks. When I told my coach, he cut me from the team. In retrospect, I can’t say I entirely blame him because six weeks was a big chunk of the season. At the time, however, I was mortified. In despair, and hoping to find a way to fill all of the spare time I suddenly had on my hands, I joined my high-school newspaper. I wrote for it, edited it, learned how to lay out pages — and found that writing and producing a publication was something I enjoyed. So having my finger broken is either one of the best things that ever happened to me or the true reason why I never went on to star in the NBA. I’m sure you can see just by looking at me that my size, strength, speed, dexterity, and obvious ability to go one-on-one with the likes of Gilbert Arenas wasn’t going to hold me back.

Seriously, though, whenever something bad happens to me–or at least something that I perceive to be bad — I look at my finger. Even today, more than 20 years later, I can’t straighten it properly. Its crookedness reminds me that every setback can become an opportunity, even if that’s not how it seems at the time. A lot has happened since then: I’ve written hundreds of articles for newspapers and magazines, I’ve authored three books, and I blogged on the National Review website as recently as this morning. Yet every now and then I realize how much I owe to the experiences I had when I was your age, even before I broke my finger. I benefited from parents and teachers who encouraged me, I practiced writing sonnets and haikus for homework, and I read books and stories voraciously. The ability to write well is an important skill that will help you no matter what you do in the future. You could write books and articles like me. You could write speeches for the president or scripts for TV shows and movies. You might also hold a job in which you’re technically not a writer but you do a lot of writing, such as designing video games, filing legal briefs, or submitting after-action reports to your Army general. So writing is a skill worth building. There’s something that every one of you can do right now that will make you better writers when you’re older, whether or not you choose to do it professionally: Read as much as possible. Find books you enjoy, track down authors that you think you might enjoy, hunt for books about books, look up books that are the basis of movies you’ve liked, and use your local library. Have you ever asked your mom or dad to take you to the mall and get denied? It’s easy for parents to tell kids that they can’t go to the mall. But if you ask your mom or dad to take you to the library, I guarantee you that they’ll find a way to get you there. When you’re at the library or in a bookstore, it’s even okay to judge a book by its cover. If a jacket illustration catches your eye, and the description on the flap intrigues you, give it a try. The important thing is to read a lot so that you can develop your interests and tastes, learn about effective communication, and tell the difference between good writing and bad writing. What you read right now may even give you material to write about later in life. I’ve written professionally about many of the writers and books that I first encountered when I was roughly your age: J.R.R. Tolkien and The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, C.S. Lewis and The Chronicles of Narnia, Ray Bradbury and Fahrenheit 451, Robert E. Howard and his tales of Conan the Barbarian, Louis L’Amour and his cowboy novels, Dr. Seuss and his favorite book of mine, which is called I Had Trouble in Getting to Solla Sollew. A little more than a year ago, I even wrote a piece for the Wall Street Journal on the life and times of Curious George. None of these were tedious exercises that a teacher forced out of me, but rather articles that I wanted to write and which I sold to editors for payment. In this respect, writing is a job like any other: I do it for the money. But it’s different, too. The financial rewards are adequate — they’re certainly enough to live on. The immaterial rewards, however, are the real draw and they’re tough to beat. They give an excuse to read good books, deliver an audience of presidents, and provide the occasion for telling my five-year-old boy that I may not be a cop but at least I get to write about them.