Delighting in my young grandchildren's storytelling efforts, I wonder if they could grow up to be real fiction writers.

What does it take to turn a child's interest in storytelling and writing into a full-blown career?

Sometimes successful writers help us by sharing their memories of their pathways to writing success. For instance, UNC writing professor Marianne Gingher's "Adventures in Pen Land: One Writer's Journey from Inklings to Ink," was recently published by the University of Missouri Press.

Gingher's first novel, "Bobby Rex's Greatest Hit," became a best seller and won North Carolina's Sir Walter Award for Fiction in 1987. Maybe you remember the engaging storyline: Pally Thompson is a very nice engaged young woman in the 1950s in the made-up town of Orfax, N.C. A hit song written and recorded by Bobby Rex Moseley, a former schoolmate, gives details of a supposed love affair between Pally and Bobby Rex. Her life goes haywire. Over time, Pally pulls her life together. Gingher's storytelling makes it all seem real.

How does a prospective published author write and sell a book like "Bobby Rex"?

"Adventures in Pen Land" is Gingher's answer to that question.

The chronicle of her writing life begins when she is in the first grade. She covets a Ding Dong School notebook, one with "all blank" pages so that she can write and draw her own work on every page. To get the book, she constructs what she calls "a calculated and dramatic lie, a lie with an agenda." She fakes a serious sickness, and when her mother asks her what she would like to have to feel better, little Marianne says the Ding Dong notebook will do the trick.

In today's kindergartens and first grades, children are regularly encouraged to use their imagination to develop and write little stories. The grammar and spelling lessons are applied with a light hand so that the children's creativity is not suffocated.

In the 1950s things were different, but her first-grade teacher encouraged Gingher's writings and drawings that filled the Ding Dong notebook with a story of a murder in a family of rabbits.

Gingher's current book is illustrated by Daniel Wallace, her colleague on the Carolina writing faculty. Wallace is best known for his novel, "Big Fish," but he is also a professional illustrator. His cartoon-like drawing of Gingher's first grade imagined rabbit murder scene is, by itself, worth the price of the book.

Gingher's drive to write continued in high school and college. But without enough confidence in her ability, she prepared herself to teach art in public schools.

Even in graduate school at UNC-G, where she finally found a teacher, Fred Chappell, who identified her talents, the reviews were sometime painful. For instance, Chappell, upon reading some of Gingher's poetry, told her, "I am sure as hell am glad it turns out that you can write fiction, because you ain't no poet, kid."

Turn out it did that she could write fiction. She proceeded to write "Bobby Rex" juggling two baby boys, a husband's changing career plans, various jobs teaching art and writing, along with the uncertainty that her efforts would ever come to the happy ending of the book's success.

For aspiring writers, Gingher's memoir is a helpful look into the uncertainty and the demands of a writing life. For the rest of us, it is a poignant, funny and gentle walk through life with an important North Carolina writer.

D.G. Martin will talk about this column on WCHL-1360 at 8:20 a.m. with Ron Stutts. His regular program, "Who's Talking," airs at 6 p.m. and 10 p.m.