Over a week ago I started a discussion about how people started writing. What was their story of how the story writing started for them. For myself the story started way back in 1995 and most people already know of the LegoLand series and how that set the tracks down for everything else. Here we have a few stories by other people on how they started their own writings.
I've been told that I always was a story teller. My mother said that before I could read, I'd pick up big books with no pictures and just start making stories up and pretend that I was reading. I remember in my first grade class, every Friday, we would take index cards and write and illustrate a book that we would get laminated and staple together and read to the class. I think this was what really got me into writing. I was so excited every Friday to get to write a story and see the finished outcome when it came out like a little book. That was most likely what made me want to be a writer.
- I wrote in notebooks after that and drew pictures to illustrate my stories after that for the next two years and then in third grade, I started using a type-writer to get my work done. I'd sit for hours and just type everything I could think of up. That was exciting for me, too, since when the pages were finished, the text looked like it had been printed in a book. I think by the time I was in fourth grade, my parents got our first computer, and then I stopped using the type-writer and would do all of my work on there.
I started writing poetry more at that point than prose, I think, and when I finally was in seventh grade and in my first year of jr high school, I showed one of my poems to my English teacher, who told me that it was very well written for my age (though looking back, it really wasn't in my opinion) and she coaxed me to enter it into a national literary contest for young writers that the school was a part in. The top fifty winners would get their work published in the anthology that comes out every year through them. So, doing what my teacher suggested, I did-- and a few months later, I received a letter in the mail telling me I had won 1st place in the competition and was getting my poem published, a cash prize, a ribbon, and a bunch of other things. Being only 12, this was probably the most exciting thing that ever happened to me, and when the books that they gave me for free came to my house, I seriously couldn't put them down.
After that, I wrote like crazy and really tried to focus on my stuff and make it well written. I turned to writing fan-fiction for a while when I was in 8th and 9th grade (filled 7 giant binders with the writing... I still have them in my closet somewhere), but still wrote original work on the side. Come 10th grade, though, I stuck strictly to original work... and I've been writing ever since.
Since then, I've had a lot of different stories to tell and lots of projects that I've worked on. I've also continued to have numerous works published in literary magazines, as well as winning awards, and having my first novella published. I've done quite a bit in those 9 years since my first publication, but I'm certain that it all stemmed back to the first time I realized how much I loved writing back in 1st grade.
- Writing is in my family. Mother, uncle, brother - all writers in their own right.
But I started the same way I think many people start writing. Primary school english. Writing stories was what we did. I was never much good at it but I loved it. Sadly we never did enough of it to keep me happy so I started doing it on my own, outside school. I guess I never stopped. I consider my first "real story" to be something I wrote when I was eight. I wrote it on an Apple Mac Classic II computer. It was partially collaborative with a friend of mine.
I was so proud of it, I decided then and there that I would be an author when I grow up.
- Well, my very first, actual story was mostly in my head, it wasn't until later that I wrote it down. It was a couple of years ago, seven I believe, and I went to see a film in the cinema. There was this guy in it, and I think that was my first crush on a movie star, though very short living. Anyways, that's how I started thinking up this story of what it would be like if an ordinary girl would meet a movie star in real life.
The one I first wrote down was five years ago. I went to a new school - the same one as my little sister - and heard about the moving from the school to a new location (though a building is yet to be erected, even though it's been 8 years since my sister first started at that school, when the plans for the big move were first unfolded). That's how I concocted a story about a curse on that piece of ground where the school would be newly situated, put upon by a girl sentenced to death there.
- I started writing when I was 11/12 as a way of dealing with a lot of stress I was going through and coping. It wasn't really stories and such then but it was just scribbling of anything that came to mind from reality, to dreams, to anything... it didn't make sense once I was done, what with the doodles and scribbles and words... you see the point?
As I got older I realized I liked creating stories and "lives" just because I could imagine ANYTHING I wanted. In space, in the ocean, whatever it interested me and I found myself doing research to learn about these things.
I also liked to write (in an actual form you could actually articulate a meaning from at least somewhat) to get my feelings out or share something.
I still like to though I haven't in a long time.
