Tyler Edwards

That's a difficult question to answer. I've been creating worlds and stories for as long as I can remember. Most of my childhood was spent coming up with epic storylines for make-believe games I'd play with my friends. I also wrote some (terrible) stories around this time.

But I guess I truly became a writer when I was sixteen. I had gone through a pretty rough time, and I needed some sense of purpose. For years, I'd had an idea for a series of books I wanted to write, and I decided I should start pursuing that goal.

I wanted to do them right, though, and I quickly realized I had absolutely no clue how to write a good book. This led me to months of reading books on writing, grammar, and editing. I also started writing short fiction for practice, which eventually led to me stumbling into writing the World Spectrum series.

I still haven't written the series I originally set out to write. I'm still practicing.

I grew up in Perth, Ontario, which is a small town about forty-five minutes outside of Ottawa. It's a lovely little tourist town, known as the prettiest town in Ontario, and surprisingly sophisticated for a town of only 6,000 people.

However, I attended elementary school in the neighbouring hamlet of Brooke Valley, and I'd say that had the biggest influence on my writing. Brooke Valley is mostly untouched wilderness, and my school grounds were no exception. It was around this time I was getting into fantasy, discovering things like Lord of the Rings and Warcraft, and this influenced the games I played during recess. My friends and I liked make-believe games where we would imagine ourselves as fantastic heroes -- wizards, knights, and Elves.

The great thing about my school's grounds was that they had such diverse environments that could stand in for anything you could imagine. There were deciduous woods that could become an enchanted forest. There was a copse of pine that had a more haunted feel. There was an old dumping ground of stones we called "the rock fort" that could become a bunker or fortress. There were groomed playgrounds that could be towns or battlefields, and wilder fields of tall grass that became wild plains and unexplored frontiers. There was an area of crumbling rocks and abandoned firepits that we imagined as ancient ruins, and a swampy area that could become a monster-infested marsh.

I was usually the one leading these games in the sense that I came up with the main ideas and storylines. It's these make-believe games that made me a writer. They taught me about creating worlds and stories. In fact, one of the major universes I write in evolved out of one such game I used to play with my friends.

I don't think my imagination would have flourished so much had I grown up somewhere more mundane.