"I dove into the theater, into my fantasy worlds," says Woolverton, tearing up at the memory. "They have always been a place for me to go, my creative worlds. In fact, I feel sorry for people who don't have them, because I don't know what they do with it, where they put the pain or the loss. Or the joy, even."

Woolverton formed a local theater company after graduation and ran it for several years, then worked as a secretary at CBS. She learned script format, story structure and character development by typing her boss' scripts, and was later promoted to a low-level development executive position. She heard pitches from comedians such as Richard Belzer, Harry Shearer, and cast members from SCTV, but still had her desk in the hallway. Nevertheless, the experience was transforming.

"I wrote up the pitches after the meetings," she says. "I watched these people come in and pitch their hearts out and sweat and jump around the room, and I thought, I am so sitting on the wrong side of the desk here." While higher-level executives took hour-and-a-half lunches, Woolverton worked on a young adult novel at her desk. Star-Wind, written entirely in the CBS hallway, was eventually published by Houghton-Mifflin, and proved to Woolverton that she could be a writer.