I write short stories (except for the one novel, which used to be a short story too). That’s how I started, back when I began using English as a way to prevent my mother from reading my diary and realized it actually worked (Oh, the delight when I knew English was the perfect disguise). After I wrote my first story in Romanian, on a few pages of an old and yellowish notebook, pages that I couldn’t just throw away with the notebook because you just don’t throw away blank pages that you could fill with words, my mom took my creation from my hands and started reading. I watched her face transform as she started smiling, and I liked it, it made me feel good. And then she started laughing, and that…well, let’s just say I swore she would never read anything of mine again… or anyone else, for that matter. Stupid me! I didn’t dare ask her why she was laughing. I was too young to interpret that on my own, I still believed that laughter only had one meaning… the one you mean when you want to make fun of people. So I isolated myself even more, and wrote more, and refused more to let anyone read anything. I was in college when I was finally able to have an honest conversation with her about it. This time she cried. Because she felt bad about not telling me why she had laughed back then. And she had laughed because she was proud and couldn’t believe how hysterically funny my story was, and she couldn’t believe I could come up with something like that at my age. We cried together over the lost time during which she wondered if I ever wrote anything again, while I wondered why I continued writing when my own mother had made fun of me, as I thought. The point is I could have had her support all this time, if only I had dared ask a question when I was 12. Don’t be afraid to ask questions, no matter what they are. Question everything, to exhaustion, until people get annoyed with you, until you have answers to keep your mind occupied for a while, and then start asking again. Ask questions when you’re confused, and don’t be intimidated by the one in front of you, they don’t know everything either. Ask when you want to understand something better and the person in front of you is saying “That’s just the way things are.” No, that’s not just the way things are, things are for a reason and you can usually find it, if only you ask enough questions. Ask even if you feel ashamed or embarrassed, there is a slight chance that the answers will take that away and you’ll realize you’re not the only one wanting to know. Just ask. It’s really not that hard to open your mouth and put a string of words together to form a question. Oh yeah, don’t forget the question mark/intonation at the end. If you do, then whatever you say is just a statement and then you really might feel a little stupid.