Reading Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh turned me into a writer.  Eleven-year-old Harriet M. Welsch (the M her own invention), as you may or may not recall, wants to be a writer.  So to prepare for being a writer, she decides to become a spy.  She keeps a notebook full of observations of the world around her — brutally honest observations about her friends, people she sees on the…