Stephen J. Cannell is an award winning author (novels, films, television)....so much for the idea that that career is closed to dyslexics!
"I’ve done pretty well for a guy who couldn’t get out of 4th Grade," Cannell said, referring to his struggles with dyslexia. Severe learning disabilities caused Cannell to be held back three times on his way to high school. These problems persist to this day, as Cannell still spells phonetically. Thankfully, he has a staff to correct the misspellings in his text. "If I hit the spell check button on a computer, it would start smoking," Cannell joked.
In fact, the acclaimed author uses a Seletric typewriter, just as he does in his TV promos. "It’s actually faster for me to write on a typewriter," Cannell said, "I produce five pages, pencil edit it and my staff types it up into my first draft. I can get 15 pages done on the Selectric in the same time it would take me to do 7 pages on the computer."
Cannell’s interest in writing was first piqued by a plagiarized poem. "I wrote a poem about Martin Luther King and turned it in to the public high school I was attending. I got a B-. My sister didn’t want to write a poem so she took mine and handed it in to her private school. She got an A and the poem appeared in the school literary magazine under the name Lynn Cannell."
Though he didn’t get direct affirmation for his writing, Cannell was encouraged. Besides poetry, his other big passion in high school was playing football. "I was a running back and I was pretty good. Football saved me from becoming a defeated person in high school. It gave me self-worth."
Cannell went on to the University of Oregon, where a creative writing teacher named Ron Salisbury mentored him. "He told me: God gave you a gift. You must always be a writer." After graduation, Cannell went to work for his father’s trucking firm but never forgot Salisbury’s words. "I’d get home from my dad’s company at 5:30 and write until 10:30 PM. After five years, my stuff began to sell. Then I got a contract with Universal and quit the trucking business."
Cannell's story is pretty common -- discouragement, a sense of self from a field outside academics, finding a mentor, and perserverance.
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