Some of us picked up language like it had been waiting in our mouths all along. Letters weren’t a mystery. Stories weren’t foreign. They felt like memory. And for those of us who began reading young—truly reading, not just reciting from repetition—there was a shift. A quiet imprint. Something in us rearranged itself around the rhythm of language.
I wrote once before about learning to read at two. This was obviously not news to anyone in my immediate family, as they had been instrumental in teaching me at home. But, the ‘outside’ discovery was made in my kindergarten class, on an ordinary day when the rest of the students had joined the teacher in singing some inane song. I had moved off to the side, as I sometimes did, uninterested in the performance. A book in hand. Eyes on the page. And that’s when someone realized I wasn’t just flipping through it or looking at the pictures. I was reading. Quietly. Independently. And not from memory. The realization landed softly but firmly, the way certain truths do.
Reading came first. Writing followed. Not in neat little journals with pastel covers, but in the margins of the mind. In the way I replayed stories. In the way I noticed how one word could shift a sentence, or how silence in a character’s dialogue often meant more than anything spoken aloud.
Early reading does something to the wiring. It doesn’t guarantee genius or literary destiny. But it opens a door sooner, and some of us walk through it before we even know we’re holding the key. We fall in love with other people’s words, but eventually we start to ask, “What if I added my own?” And once that question settles into the mind of an early reader, the storytelling instinct is never far behind.
Reading early doesn’t just teach comprehension. It teaches connection. We learn how people think, how they love, how they fall apart. We see the consequences of silence and the power of a single sentence. By the time we’re old enough to understand ourselves, we’ve already spent years understanding characters. And often, that practice turns inward. We begin writing because the page is where we’ve always gone to listen.
Not every early reader becomes a writer. Not every storyteller came to books early. But there is something about that head start that seems to stir the fire sooner. When you’ve lived a thousand lives before the age of ten, it’s hard not to want to write one of your own. Not to mimic, but to make. Not to echo, but to shape.
We tend to carry that same curiosity into adulthood. The way we observe. The way we sense what’s not being said. We grew up reading between the lines, so writing them became a natural extension. We don’t just tell stories. We feel them before they’re fully formed.
It’s not about age for the sake of achievement. It’s about exposure. Immersion. The way early reading lays a foundation so deep that years later, when we sit down to write, we’re not building from scratch. We’re building from instinct. From something etched so quietly into our bones that we don’t always remember when it started.
But when the words begin to rise, we recognize the shape of them. We know the weight of rhythm. We know how to listen. And when we write, that early fire flickers back to life and says:
“There you are. I’ve been waiting.”
xo Ametra.
