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Why Did You Start Writing?
I've been writing stuff since I was big enough to hold a pencil.But life kinda got in the way, even though I did get paid for author-ish stuff until I could finally retire.
Then the people in my head really started creating a stink.
So I started writing fiction. Now I can't stop.
I don't care if people don't buy it. Or if people don't like it. Though it's very exciting when people read and like my work. But in the end I'm doing it for me. And I'm having the time of my life.
I reckon I'm one lucky b***h
I told myself stories in my head all my life that I can remember. I grew up on a yacht, and we moved around a lot, so I didn't have a lot of long-term friends as a kid; the voices in my head were much more constant companions. Actually writing things down took a swift kick in the rear from a friend in my early teens - she listened to me confess what I was doing with all the time I spent staring into middle distance, and asked me why the h*** I didn't write all these stories down. (She may have regretted that question once I started, but hey.)
I've been addicted ever since.
I started many years ago because I was bored silly (was in the Army at the time), and one of the other guys said he was writing a book, and I thought, "Hey, that's a great idea." I gave it up when I left the Army and life got more interesting. I took it up again a few years later because I hated my job and thought writing would be more fun. It was for awhile, but It took me too long to get published and paid very little, so I quit again. The good thing about it is that now, in retirement, it has given me an avocation in which I already have a lot of experience. Now I can enjoy it.
Can't remember a time when I didn't write. I remember being six or seven and typing out a story about a whale on my mother's old typewriter. I remember being eight and the Montessori teacher complaining that I spent too much time doing creative writing instead of math. I remember being nine and entering a writing contest (with a book that was horribly derivative). I wrote at home. I wrote in my mother's classroom. I wrote in my classroom. When we got a computer in the house at age ten I wrote an entire novella, which my mother had spiral bound.The only time I stopped writing was during university, when my boyfriend of the time showed so little interest in my writing,and when my poems were snubbed by the high brow university writing group. I decided that I was no good and stopped for nearly ten years. Then I discovered blogging and NaNoWriMo, and it all started again.
I've always wanted to do something to express my creativity and I am finding that writing is the only thing that I am competent enough to enjoy. I really feel like my imagination was given to me for a reason and sometimes I wonder where the inspiration is coming from.
I've been writing since middle school. I do it because I enjoy it and even if others don't appreciate it, I like reading my own work. I like reading about the characters I create and how, when they aren't controlling the story, I can make them do whatever I want (unlike my kids ;) ) I also love the feeling of finishing that first draft, no matter how much has to be changed later. If I couldn't write I think my head who get to big from holding everything inside.
I started writing because I like creating stories to entertain. It was back when Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were big in the 80s and 90s, thanks to the cartoon. I was a wee lad who thought he should write about Raphael. I thought for sure that I could write about my favorite mutant turtle characters and make my own story about them.My fanfic writing days were short lived at the age of 8 with no one nursing my creative side. It wasn't until middle school when a teacher took an interest in me after I excelled at a creative writing assignment and she encouraged me to keep writing. And so I did, and here I am today still writing to create amazing and intricate plots to entertain myself and others.
Mod
... yep.
C.B. wrote: "I started to write out of spite.... yep."
OK, now you have to tell me more. I'm intrigued.
In 1964, when I was twelve, I wrote my first song on a piece of brown paper with a blunt pencil. It was not something I had been told to write for school, so it seemed a magical thing to do. Since then I have written much verse and prose. To write in verse and prose is my one gift and it remains a magical, comforting experience.
I started to write fiction seriously when I was working on a nonfiction book that was driving me crazy. I really needed a change. Now I write both fiction and nonfiction.
I don't really know why I started to write. To be honest, I might be the only writer who never liked writing. In school, I dreaded those days when we had to write a story. Although, I never had problems finding an idea, i just hated to put it down on paper. It gave me headaches.Yet, I always loved to try different things. I used to love to draw. For as long as I remember, long before I even started school and learned to write, I drew pictures, and later on, portraits, etc. That is…until my ex made me stop. He didn't like that my favorite subjects were male, musicians and singers. Since I needed to find something to occupy my mind, I studied German. Same thing. He accused me of corresponding with a man in Germany. To my knowledge she was a woman but what can I say…Jealousy makes you see what you want. Anyway, I stopped that too.
Even after my divorce, I was afraid to try anything new until my current hubby encouraged me. One night, we talked about what genre we liked and how it was hard to find what we really enjoyed. That is when he planted the seed of writing in my mind by giving me an idea.
I never thought I would actually write an entire book, not alone a second or that I'd be working on a third. Does this make me 'not a real' writer? Maybe, I don't know. But I just don't see myself quitting any time soon.
I, too, began writing once I learned how to construct a sentence. I started out as a bookworm reader. Then came the stories on paper. Certain songs or words would spark scenes in my head, characters would start talking, and so I began writing seriously to get them out.I looovvve my imagination and being able to put it all in a book to entertain others. I've learned to write for myself, and if people like it, then I'm happy and appreciative. Thank-you. Even if only one person likes it, then that's what it's all about.
I've been writing for as long as I remember. It's just now that I decided to write what I love and entertain many~But, I'm not done with my first novel yet, haha.
I was the annoying kid at school who when told to write a story in a few pages, handed the teacher a mountain of paper. I used to write short stories in little red notebooks and my poor family were kind enough to indulge me when I asked to read them aloud.I tried short stories when I was in my twenties. They were published in independent magazines and anthologies and the thrill of seeing my words in print spurred me on to the next step of writing a novel which was published in 2012.
I did dabble in scriptwriting but it was incredibly difficult but rewarding. It is something I will probably go back to when I have more time (i.e. retirement).
A clairvoyant once told me that I was murdered because I wrote a controversial piece on the church. Looks like my writing has always got me in trouble!
I guess ive always wanted to be a writer after a teacher at primary school(elementry) put on my report card that i had a enquiring mind and great imagination and i would one day earn my living as a writer. Well i have not yet managed it ,but since emigrating here from the UK ,i have started .writing ,9 books to date. The first were factual books on gun rights,something i was passionate about. Being a police officer in the UK for 21 years.
Someone once told me to write what you know,it was good advice.
But after 5 factual books and an autobiography i decided to try historical fiction. That seems to have served me well.maybe my old teacher did see something in me ,that it has taken some years for me to realise.
Mod
Okay, I should explain. That is true.
I was dating someone who had a life's dream - to become an author. For seven months they told me this, all the time. In seven months, I had never seen him write a sentence, let alone any novels. This started quite the fight one night.
The long and short of it was that I told him to be a writer, he needed to write. Anything!
He refused, You can't start in the middle, or with an outline, or without knowing everything first.
We did not agree on anything.
It was a pretty intense fight. After he stormed out, I sad down and angrily pounded out 4 chapters of a book, to 'Show him you could just start writing'. We broke up before he knew I did that though, but I kept writing my book because I liked it. A year later he found out, and thought it was funny, so no real hard feelings. He got a free copy!
I guess, I had written a lot before that, little stories, D&D campaigns, and things. This incident just really provided the drive to prove that someone could just start to write a book (heavily edit out the angry bits), and publish it.
C.B. wrote: "S.J. wrote: "OK, now you have to tell me more. I'm intrigued."Okay, I should explain. That is true.
I was dating someone who had a life's dream - to become an author. For seven months they told ..."
I love that he got a free copy and there were no hard feelings :) Thanks for sharing.
Tim wrote: "Haha... That sounds about right, only I love working with my characters - most of them, anyway."I do too, but if you tell them I'll deny it flat :)
Great topic! When I was younger, I hated writing. Just hated it and could think of nothing worse that having a job someday where I was forced to write. That was my personal vision of hell.
So in 8th-grade English, we got an assignment to write a short story. I was displeased. We each got a theme for said story, and I don't recall how these were assigned but I got red. Telling a teenage boy to write a short story based on "red" is a foolish thing to do.
So I wrote a short story about a young woman with auburn hair, dressed in scarlet, riding a roan horse through an autumn forest on her way to duel. As I recall it ended with blood from her defeated foe's decapitated body pooling in autumn leaves while the sun set. You see, he [the teacher -- a nice younger fellow] asked for red, and he was gonna get red and red and red and more red, etc. I figured no one would ask me write anything about red -- or any other color -- again.
BTW: the prose was decidedly purple. ;-)
Anyway, I turned in the story and when he gave them back us, he ask to talk to me after class.
Oops...
In fear and trembling, I stayed after class, my bravado quite quashed. He made me an offer. He'd put me on independent study, I wouldn't attend class anymore but go to the library and write. I'd turn in whatever I wrote on some schedule I don't recall and he'd give me an A. I'd never gotten an A in my academic career to that point and I disliked English class. Going to the library and scribbling seemed congenial.
Off I went to the library and wrote page upon page and fantasy-ish stuff in the thud and blunder mode. I turned it in. I got my A. Mission accomplished.
A couple of years later (Sophomore year in high school) I attempted to leverage this experience by taking a creative writing class for an easy A. Instead, I got accused of writing pornography by the teacher (Mrs Wilson, who adored Gertrude Stein). She convened a meeting of the English dept (and other notables), handed out my objectionable story and demanded I be skinned or crucified or censured or something. She did not prevail.
I learned of this when two other teachers in the dept approached me and said they'd read my story, they liked it and they "didn't think it was pornographic at all". After the smelling salts got me back on my feet, I began to consider there might be something to this writing business.
And yes, I did embark on a career where I primarily wrote reports. And now I am a full-time author. So much for my youthful vision of hell.
PS: I blame that independent study and the fact that I skipped freshman English for my near-total ignorance of grammar and the rules of punctuation, beyond where the period goes. But, truth to tell, I've never felt the lack to any significant degree.
Loving the crazy voices in the head! I think we all have those, and you're right, they don't stop even when you write! I guess I always had a passion for storytelling. I loved creating stories, either making stupid videos with my friends or writing plays or comic books. I wrote a novel-length fan fiction that was actually pretty good (high praise from the fans of the series, that is), but never something truly my own. Then one day I had an idea and just ran with it. I never tried before because of a lack of confidence, but once I wrote the first one, novels came out of me nonstop. That was five years ago, and I'm finally returning to the first one to edit it and put it on some shelves!I blame it all on my love of reading, watching, and hearing stories long before I could produce my own. There are only so many stories you can fill your brain with before the mixture overflows and comes pouring out as something brand new and uniquely beautiful.
I've always been coming up with stories as far back as I can remember, stories I usually acted out via my toys (usually a combination of my Star Wars and My Little Pony toys. Yay imagination!). Creating stories was also how I entertained myself on long car rides as we moved from place to place (military brat). Anyway, I'd initially had plans on making movies, but when my mom suggested going as a "writer" for our school career day (where you dressed up as what you wanted to be when you grew up) I went with it, and the idea of writing stuck with me ever since... even despite the fact that I wasn't big into reading at the time (that actually came later).Really it was kind of inevitable since creating stories has always been such a big part of my life. Even on those days when I'm feeling a tad bitter toward my career choices, I can't imagine being anything other that someone who writes stories.
Starting to write was definitely a process. Even when I was stuck with handwriting, I had the urge to write stories. I was really bad at finishing them though. I had very little patience. With age has come patience (a little anyway) and my computer has made it possible for me to write fast enough to satisfy me. I got my first decent computer in '95, and started writing Elfquest fanfic. Later, in college, I wrote really steamy Star Wars fanfic. As I went on I decided I'd better use some of my own characters.
More years went by and I settled down more and decided I wanted to write longer stuff - my novels started petering out at the half to three quarters mark, not at the first five or ten pages. My first actually completed novel happened because of NaNoWriMo. That showed me how to just keep at something, every day, for a long time, and celebrate my results as they came.
Around that time I discovered blogging so I started truly enjoying the beauty of the five paragraph essay. That taught me more about writing frequently, how every long meal is eaten one bite at a time. Somewhere in here I learned the joy of a detailed outline.
Now I'm working on two novels, have ideas for several short stories, am polishing older works so I can Kindlize them, have plans for a nonfiction book, and manage to blog at least four entries a week. Now... if they are any good or not, that's another story. But I think I could say that I write!
Thomas wrote: "I started writing because I like creating stories to entertain. It was back when Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were big in the 80s and 90s, thanks to the cartoon. I was a wee lad who thought he should write about Raphael. I thought for sure that I could write about my favorite mutant turtle characters and make my own story about them."Thank you for acknowledging who the best turtle was!
I began writing when it became painfully obvious that my lack of musical talent actually was going to prevent me from becoming a hair metal goddess.
Writing was a hidden passion for me. I've been writing since I was a child. but I didn't take it seriously--it was just something to pass the time. It wasn't until I fell ill and was home for a month that I discovered how much I just loved to write. Writing brings me joy. And that's why I write.
We were given a writing assignment in first grade. It was to use fifteen vocabulary words in a two paragraph story.My teacher was handed a twenty-one page, concise short story. She told me I had a creative gift, and also asked me to not write enormously long papers because she hated grading them.
I made them longer.
I've loved writing since I was five, but the real reason I decided to stick with it as a permanent focus in my life is because it makes me truly happy. At thirteen, I was certain that I didn't want to be what everyone was telling me to be - I wanted to be an author! A decade later, second novel in editing with many more on the way, and I can thank my current (and only) support system to my lovely wife. She's believed in me since day one.
And, for the non-sappy stuff... I really, really like to kill people off. It gives me oodles of goosebumps.
*Drops the mic*
Mod
Good one!
Whenever a topic like this comes up, I think my answer is different. Just in case anyone is keeping score, there are reasons for this. There are so many, many, many things from my past that lead to this writer thing that I don't list them all every time. Some bits are a bit embarrassing and I have not ever admitted them... but I think I will this time, since a character in an upcoming story does the same thing I used to do.
I've always been creative. For most of my younger life, I was really more interested in drawing and acting than in writing.
In fifth grade, we used to have to take vocabulary words and turn in a page of sentences, using each word to show we understood the word. One week I turned in my sentences... and each sentence made up the beginning of a story about a boy named Mark who lived on some tropical island somewhere and liked to swim in a lagoon with dolphins and he found a hidden treasure... I ended it there. The next week I continued with that week's words. And so on. The teacher loved it and said she would not give the papers back until I was out of high school. I've never bothered to ask for them back. I think about it sometimes, but she liked it better than I did.
For a lark, another kid and I wrote a novel in sixth grade. We had a good time doing it, but it was terrible.
I enjoyed telling stories. To myself. Yeah, this is the embarrassing part. I had a paper route for years. Around 1979 or '80, I started getting into Marvel Comic books. I was also playing a role playing game called Top Secret, so I imagined Marvel comics started putting out a comic book based on my role playing campaign. And, so, the secret agent characters from my game were fighting evil along side the likes of Spider-Man, The Beast and Daredevil. And every day I would tell myself another issue's worth of story, including several ongoing subplots.
In high school, for a lark, I took creative writing courses. I took it to get an easy A as I knew I could write stories. Honestly, I didn't like to do it, but I knew I could. In one story we were supposed to write about our future selves. I wrote myself as a successful cartoonist. My teacher wrote that I should consider being a writer.
In my first year of college, I dabbled a little with writing. I was trying to write a novel about werewolves in a high school. Something like that. I didn't stick with it.
In the late eighties, I started writing a novel about a young man running off and going on the road with a band or something. I didn't stick with it. Around that time I discovered John Irving. I found him to be trash.
A couple years later, around 1990 I think, I gave John Irving another try and fell madly in love with his writing. That's when I finally got serious about it. I wrote a novel that was, pardon me, fantastic. The problem was, I finished it rather quickly and by this time I was devouring many books on how to write. Most of them suggested that writing a novel should take a long, long time. So, I thought I'd done something wrong and rewrote it and rewrote it, dragging the process out. In the end, I had a story that was far too sterile and overworked to do anyone any good. I'd worked the soul out of it and ended up with a string of (estimating) 250,000 words and nothing more. I had, at least, learned enough about writing to tell treasure from trash... and I trashed it.
For many years I worked on a series of novels about superheroes. The thing was, back then there were not that many series of books out, no one was doing superhero novels and I figured no one would want to publish them so I wrote them just for fun.
I wrote a lot of novels over the years, just for fun, then kind of drifted from writing again around 2008.
About three years ago I bought a Kindle. I soon learned that a lot of books I was looking at and buying were done by something called "Indie authors" who were publishing directly through Amazon. Anyone here familiar with this? I might look into it.
G.G. wrote: "I don't really know why I started to write. To be honest, I might be the only writer who never liked writing. In school, I dreaded those days when we had to write a story. Although, I never had problems finding an idea, i just hated to put it down on paper. It gave me headaches."You are not alone, GG, though I think I can go one better. Not only did I loathe writing, I didn't have ideas either!
I studied mathematics at university and delighted in the fact that it was the only subject that didn't involve writing essays or stories of any kind.
I only started late, probably a mid-life crisis :) I just had a scene in my head that wouldn't go away and it bugged me until I wrote it down. Then of course I had to build a story around it. That was the slippery slope ...
Kim wrote: "I was the annoying kid at school who when told to write a story in a few pages, handed the teacher a mountain of paper. I used to write short stories in little red notebooks and my poor family were..."Yeah. That was me, too. But I found out really early in life that my "paragraph-phobic" friends and family didn't want to read anything I wrote. That eventually led to a neurotic tendency towards perfection, as if just making the sentences a little better--maybe one more tweak--would somehow change the indifference of the world around me.
But really, writing has always been my way of communicating. I was once called "chicken s**t" for writing a letter to a girl instead of talking to her, but I knew that I didn't stand a chance trying to get my words right the first time if I did it with my mouth. At least my pencil came with an eraser and I could proofread before submitting.
As the years went by and I started wishing I could convey wisdom to the younger generation, writing came back as my medium of choice. Unfortunately, I seem to have been born about a century too late, since many of my young friends are now just as afraid of words on the page as were my family and contemporaries from my childhood. But still, I find it more reassuring to be able to read what I want to "say" before it is finally presented for all to "hear". And really, as I've so often been reminded, even if I used another medium, would anybody really listen anyways?
There were stories I wanted to exist in the world that didn't yet.
I have always liked reading and stories in general. Every now and then I started thinking, 'That story was good, but it'd have been so much cooler if X and Y had happened.'
One thing led to the other, and I was writing full stories before I knew it.
Why did I start writing. Like several have said, the characters in my head wanted a way out...they were tired of my manipulating them so I was the lead character and they were the minor actors. I also had come to despise my job and wanted out. No, I'm not a best selling author. I retired and decided to use my writing as extra income. It was something I could do while traveling. (Oh, I forgot to say I ran away from home after retiring to see N. America) What I didn't count on was the necessary learning curve to becoming a publishable author.According to traditional publishers, I don't fit their 'criteria' at this time. What that means is that I don't write the highlander stories, motorcycle gang love stories, etc. I don't follow the crowd on what I write. Currently, I'm waiting on the last proof for my first book. I had to let it go even though I have several others which, to me, are much better. I need to get something out there as a start so I can practice marketing before the better books are published.
I enjoy writing, having started by doing research papers throughout high school and college. Writing a novel was something I tried, but I totally hated what I wrote so I discarded everything up until two years ago. At that point, I did what a friend told me to do and sat down and wrote a complete novel ignoring the first chapter, which I hated. 500K words later it was completed. I still love Kate and her adventures but I do need to get it down to a publishable size or divide it into several books. I threw it on the back burner and tried again. This time, I used a very sketchy (like one line per chapter) outline of each chapter. Okay, 50K words later I had a decent romantic suspense novel.
I guess you can see where I'm headed. Ten books later, I'm just now getting published. I can write them, but the editing and revising is time consuming. Currently for NaNoWriMo, I am doing a second book on the second novel I wrote. I'd like to have a couple of them completed prior to publishing the initial one of the series.
Over all, I love writing and am having a lot of fun with it. The more I learn, the easier it is becoming. The characters I have daydreamed into existence are now seeing the light of day and are becoming these fun people I always wanted to be.
Mod
I still write for the same reason, to keep the boredom at bay.
Mod
Whenever I see your icon, it looks like that chair behind you is also part of your head, so your real head looks like a mask you are wearing. Like this giant sideways head, with this mask. A cartoon villain almost. It is awesome and I love it.
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Also, good story!
I'll try not to be too much of a downer here:My parents went through a fairly nasty divorce, and my siblings and I were split up. My younger siblings and I left with my mother and my older siblings stayed with my father. Long story short, it was frustrating; I was pulled around by the nose for years, pushed around by forces outside of my control.
For me, writing was a way to seize control of SOMETHING in my life. The letters, words, and sentences, the plots and characters I put onto the page are MINE. That was--and still is--an exciting prospect.
Stephen wrote: "I'll try not to be too much of a downer here:My parents went through a fairly nasty divorce, and my siblings and I were split up. My younger siblings and I left with my mother and my older siblin..."
Yay Stephen. Taking control is hard when you are a child. Writing is cathartic.
To everyone who posted on this thread. Isn't it awesome to be us.?
Loving these comments!!! We are so lucky to be able to do what we love!
It's great to read everyone's genesis stories. I understand you!I write for my own entertainment. I write because there are books I want to read that I can't find... so I write them. I write to hopefully reach out to people, make a connection in some way, find my tribe. I write because my mind is whirr whirr whirr and I gotta put these ideas somewhere.
I made up stories before I could even write letters. I would babble at my grandmother, and the lovely dear put up with me. I wrote fiction based on my role playing game characters in college, where I was getting my degree in engineering. I then posted some stuff on literotica and got some thumbs up, so now I'm here, self-pubbing my own erotica/fantasy stories hoping that some people enjoy them, that I find the people who like the same things I like, so I feel like I belong.
Dwayne wrote: "Whenever a topic like this comes up, I think my answer is different."You and me both. I like to attribute a lot of things because so many things played huge factors. Sure, Ninja Turtles was the start for me, but if it wasn't for some very heavy influences early on like Star Trek TNG, The Legend of Zelda, and The Chronicles of Narnia my imagination wouldn't have soared to even get to that point. If it wasn't for a reading assignment in middle school where I got to pick a book to read, which happened to be one of Anne McCaffrey's shorter novels (Dragonsong), I wouldn't have attempted to emulate her during that writing assignment where the teacher encouraged me.
I met Peter S. Beagle (The Last Unicorn) a few years back and because he too was a huge influence on me from a young age I offered him a physical copy of my book. He graciously accepted and I daydream that he read I and was just as entertained with my world as I was his.
Same here. I was a voracious reader as a child and always felt I could provide my own twists to the stories I was reading. Add to that, willing classmates who snapped up everything I wrote and encouraged me to write more, as did my teachers. Wish I had some of those classmates to buy my books now.
I write mostly to tell the stories I have in my head...both original and fan fiction.
I write for the sheer joy of writing. It gives me so much pleasure to get my stories down on paper (or pixels, as the case may be).
Because i am possessed. No really, if I don't write, they all start talking to me and I cannot sleep! So I must. I must write.
To make people laugh and to to make them think. Hopefully, the laughter keeps them reading (and thinking)!
All I can say is that I'm glad to hear that I'm not the only one hearing their characters incessant chat in their head. I just could not stand it any longer. Do they ever shut up?
I started to write because my husband was tired of hearing about my idea for a book instead of reading it. One year later, my book is almost finished with the editing phase. I'm so glad I did it! It's been the best and hardest challenge I've had in a long time.
One of my characters did stop talking to me once. To be fair I did terrible things to him. We're on talking terms again now and I have to say I prefer the incessant chatter to the cool silence :)
It was a simple decision for me. I had to have surgery at 23, which would leave me bed-ridden for 3 months. So, I had to put that time to good use so I decided to write my first book, which turned out to be the second book I published. And with that I carried on writing, publishing my first novel last month.When I returned to Seville, where I was living at the time I swore I would not buy myself a TV until I had finished the manuscript. I had known then it would take me four years to complete it I probably wouldn't have made such a brash decision, but I am a man of my word, for better or for worse.
It was never my intention to take up writing, I was pushed into it but I didn't mind being pushed around.
MJ Colewood
I'll start:-
I'm busy with my first novel (I recently unpublished to change my book from a series to a standalone) and the reason I decided to start writing was the voices in my head just would not shut up. After hearing constant conversations I decided to get them out on paper in the hopes I could get my head back. (Alas that didn't work). On the upside I get to bring out my evil, power hungry side and completely mess with the lives of my characters.
PS. If you think you read this post already you're not going mad. I accidently deleted my own post. Yip, I'm a dumbass.