Megan Whalen Turner was born in Fort Still, Oklahoma on November 21, 1965. Turner, always a reader, decided to become a writer at the age of ten when she could not find anything to read; unfortunately, she "couldn't think of anything to write."

After learning that Roald Dahl kept a notebook of ideas, she tried that approach, but each of her ideas "just sat there on the page. It did not magically turn into a story the way it was supposed to."

Turner gave up writing until she needed to select a field of study and a senior project during her third year at the University of Chicago. Although she chose children's literature with the idea of writing her own stories, she called the results "almost uniformly horrible." She was afraid of writing "anything that wasn't perfect and nothing comes out perfect the first time." She...