I'm one of those writers who started young. I wrote my first book at the age of seven - all three pages of it. It was about a very large family - something I desperately wanted at the time because I was an only child.
Much, much later, I began selling stories to women's magazines, and a very long time after that, after I'd had two children, my first children's book, THE TIME TREE, was published by Walker Books.
Writing a novel is living intimately with the characters you've created, and it can take a very long time - sometimes years. I enjoy writing for Young Adults because it's such a formative, scary and challenging part of anyone's life. I'm working on a couple of novels for adults, too.