Biography
My Official Biography
Holly Robinson is a novelist, journalist, and ghostwriter. Under her own name, she has published a memoir and five novels with Penguin Random House, as well as articles, essays, and humor columns in national publications such as Real Simple and Parents. As a ghostwriter, she has published fourteen works of nonfiction with major publishers such as St. Martin’s, Simon & Schuster, and Penguin Random House. Holly holds a B.A. in biology and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing, and she is fluent in Spanish. Her special areas of interest include education, health, medical research, family relationships, immigrant stories, Latin America, and women’s lives.
My Unofficial Biography
I never meant to be a writer. I studied biology in college because I either wanted to be a veterinarian or a doctor. But life intervened during my last semester of college when I had to take one more elective and I chose a class in creative writing with a professor who started out by telling us that “writers are born, not made.”
I believed him. I was sure that I couldn’t have been born to be a writer because I’d never imagined myself as one. I had never even met a writer!
Yet, from the moment I sat down to write, I became completely absorbed in my work. To the horror of my parents, I abandoned the idea of medical school, though I promised that if I didn’t get to be rich or famous (preferably both) in one year, I would let common sense rule and find a “real” career with a steady paycheck.
Of course, that never happened, but as I became ever more passionate about writing, I did what many writers do to support my secret habit: I worked a thousand odd jobs. Along the way, I earned an MFA in creative writing at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. Some of my classmates there were brilliant writers, but not all of them became successful. In looking back now, I can see that many of the writers who “made it” weren’t the flashy ones at parties or the award winners. No, the success stories were the hard workers, those who regularly churned out new pages or put in the time revising their manuscripts.
After finishing my MFA, I meandered into journalism, marketing, and teaching jobs. I wrote around the edges of my life, and every now and then I sent something out and got rejected.
I got married, had children, got divorced, got remarried, and added a new baby to our blended family. Years slipped by with nothing published other than a couple of literary stories and a few newspaper articles. Then I read an essay by Joyce Maynard in Redbook magazine and thought, Hey, I’d like to write an essay like that. I did, and that essay won an award in a contest. Soon after that, I sold it to a national magazine.
That was the start of my full-time writing career. I began regularly selling articles, essays, and advice columns to a variety of newspapers and magazines. Then one morning, as I was driving home from the grocery store, a title floated across the windshield of my car: The Gerbil Farmer’s Daughter. After I finished laughing, my mouth went dry. I had the germ of my first book.
I knew nothing about writing nonfiction, so naturally, I went to my local library. I found several books that told me how to put together a nonfiction proposal. Nobody was more surprised than I was when my agent sold the book based on that proposal. Since then, I have gone on to sell novels as well as ghostwriting other people’s memoirs and nonfiction books in diverse fields.
Here is my advice: Your success will be determined by your passion and persistence. We each find our own paths. Believe in yourself, put in the hours, and the rest will follow.