How Did You First Become Interested In Writing?

One day I just kept thinking of all the stories I wanted to tell. then I just said, damnit I'm going to do it.

I first started writing for an audience with fanfiction. My goal was just, I want to write a story too. I like to feel included.

Second grade, our first practice standardized test in a line of many to come, leading up to the official test in 10th grade. We were randomly given a prompt and had to write something about it. Because we were teeny little wee ones, we didn't have anything complicated to write. We'd get either a fiction prompt or a non-fiction prompt. When the teacher told us to start, I flipped my sheet over and found the fiction one. Whatever bug bit me that day never let go. Hoorah, random number generator of life!

Growing up, I enjoyed making up stories and was always encouraged to do so. My mom would let me tell her the stories I came up with, and when I was little, she'd entertain me during car rides by helping me come up with stories about a cast of characters I'd created.

At some point when I was a bit older, it occurred to me that I could try writing.

My first grade teacher must have recognized some budding writer bug in me, because a few weeks into the school year she gave me a notebook and told me that I should start writing stories down. I still have stacks of notebooks sitting in my closet from elementary school. Lots of stories about rainbow colored alien poodles and giant heart monsters eating school buses.

Looking back, it's probably a good thing that I confined all of those ideas to paper instead of telling people about them...

When I discovered the glorious mysteries of the written word, at age four.

caw

Well, it would appear I'm late to the party.
I started at the grand old age of 16. My very best friend would often forward stories she found online. It was after one particularly good one (now forgotten in the depths of time, regrettably) where I made an off-hand comment about thinking about giving writing a whirl. She told me to get on with it and I spent a week vomiting up a poorly-written, even more poorly-thought-out story. Happily, I realised it was bloody awful and abandoned it, but have yet to stop writing.
Best decision ever.

Reading "The Time Machine" by H.G. Wells for the first time when I was 8. About 9 years later I posted the begining of something online, and boy was it awful. Went to fanfiction for a bit, now I write both fanfics and original works. Eventually I may stop doing fanfiction, but it has helped my original work immensely. So, for now, I will continue working on novels and free original work, and keep my fanfiction proving ground to explore things in.

How Did You First Become Interested In Writing?

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Short answer: I wrote.

Long(er) answer: My sixth grade teacher stuck a picture of a house up on the blackboard and told us to write a short story using the house as inspiration. I churned out 11 pages or so that took ten or fifteen minutes to read to the class. I was hooked.

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away I read a story in Twilight Zone Magazine and said to myself, "Well! I can do that."

What a trip it's been...

tri

When I was fifteen, I did well in english classes except for finishing short stories. My stories never ended and my assignments were always pages longer than my classmates. During one of those projects, I had six pages of unfinished story instead of the assigned three. We had to read our stories out loud, and I begged not to read mine even if it affected my grade because I didn't want the class groaning at me for boring them to death. Teacher said that was a no-go and I had to read them all. By page four, I expected everyone to be asleep but they were all staring at me. They weren't talking or secretly eating smuggled food. All eyes were on me, and when I read my last page, half the class's hands went up. They pelted me with questions about what was going to happen or who ended up with who. I felt amazing, especially since they had only asked a total of two questions during the other fifteen projects. For the first time I thought, "Wouldn't this be nice to do for a living?"

Unfortunately, I never finished that story and I was told repeatedly that writing was the dumbest career possible. It took me ten years to stop caring and go for it.

Second grade. Had a writing assignment for class. Teacher gushed. It was all over after that. >.<

Around Grade three or four. I'd read most of the Wizard of Oz books, most of Enid Blyton's Folk in the Faraway tree, Mary Stewart, Chronicles of Narnia, etc. and was very bored in most of my classes so I'd daydream endlessly with me being in all their stories.
Wish I'd written them down - almost none of my English classes ever involved any creative writing. I didn't actually start writing much at all until after I'd finished university. Then it was because I was in boring office jobs afterwards, and it kept me busy.

And no, I wasn't slacking, but I temped a fair amount in work environments with a lot of politics, etc. Sometimes there wasn't much to do but keep a chair at a desk warm.

My mum was probably a big factor. She really encouraged us to read and take an interest in books from a young age. I remember falling in love with Narnia, The Faraway Tree/Enchanted Wood and all the boarding School books (Mallory Towers etc). she used to play a writing game with us where she would give us a a few titles to choose from (.e.g 'Anne runs away to the circus!') and we would have to write a story based on this title. Then I can remember being around 10 and constantly buying jotters and pens with my pocket money and starting to write 'a book'. I always remember one which I titled 'The Haunted House on the Hill'. Pretty much all of my stories would begin with a family moving to a new place and strange things happening in the house. (not a lot has changed since!)

I loved creative writing at school, I enjoyed it more than anything. I definitely think the passion comes from your first experiences of reading and the magic feeling of discovering and visualising a different world. There's nothing else quite like it.

When I was sixteen, and a story I wrote circulated around my entire year (in retrospect it was full of plot holes, but nobody else seemed to notice). It was also the time that I joined my first writing community online.

Before this point, writing was just something I had fun doing in English classes because I felt I was good at it. I posted some stuff to various writing websites and the overwhelmingly positive responses I got gave me an incredible rush of joy. I started getting really excited about my ideas.

I realised that if I took it seriously I might actually get somewhere with it. So here I am!

I forget. I think I just sorta woke up one day when I was about 11 or 12 and wanted to tell a story and wanted people to read it. Then I wanted to tell more stories. And more stories.

I always loved to read, and when going to sleep I always made up little stories as i drifted off. I just never thouht anyone else would be interested

Anyoldway, I got ME. There were only a few things I could manage without having to lie down afterwards (washing up was something I had to plan for ffs). Roleplaying (sort of D&D only not -- Middle Earth based) was one thing, and I almost always am "god" because I can come up withstories/additions on the fly. And I had a couple of NPCs that needed some backstory and....

So I started and realised that I liked it. A lot. So I carried on. I started in my mid thirties?

Basically it came down to writing, or watching that woman off of Car Booty (and I swear EVERY OTHER DAYTIME TELLY SHOW at the time) in which case I was going to have to break the telly or do something dire to her.

I was twenty-six. I was at my aunt's house, all alone, and could find only two magazines in the whole house. I read both, and on of them had an article about Robert Heinlein wherein he said he wrote his first short story in an effort to pay an overdue bill.

Like him, I had overdue bills. I figured what he could do I could at least try. I sat down, read a grammar book, and then wrote a short story in two days, and mailed it off. It sold, and paid a bit more than my day job did in a month.

I quit my day job the moment that check came in the mail.

I was a shy teenager, didn't have many friends and got bullied in high school. As a result, I spent a lot of time alone. I decided to write down my feelings and started writing poetry and stories.

Sat Nam! (literally "Truth Name"--a Sikh greeting)

In 6th grade I wrote a poem as an assignment, and the teacher thought it was amazingly good. That spurred me to write poetry.

Fiction has taken lots longer because in classes we always talked about theme and symbols and such like, and it took awhile to realize that fiction is about character and plot. (Go ahead and laugh. I do too at this point.)

Because I wasn't getting fiction, I put writing prose on hold until I had something to write about. Which is why my published works are non-fiction.

Blessings,

Siri Kirpal

I was 4 when I learned to read, and right away I started reading A LOT, so by my first year of full-day school my teachers were struggling to find books to assign me to read. So, I started writing my own. I started with what I now know is called fanfiction - Bobbsey Twins, Rainbow Brite, Sindy, even a lengthy and fantastical sequel to that cartoon movie The Snowman. By the time I was 7, if I didn't have a notebook with a pretty (and relevant) picture on the cover to write in, I would write on scraps of paper and create my own covers using scraps of wallpaper. I was quite an industrious little tyke, now that I think about it.

I was determined that I would beat the author of the Garden Gang books (anyone remember those?) by becoming the youngest published author ever (she was 9). Yeah, that didn't happen.