How did you start writing?

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tsherren

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I had always struggled with English as a language. During grade school and even university, I avoided almost anything that involved writing or heavy reading. This was in part due to a LD. The legibility of my writing was poor, my spelling super, and my thought organization lowered my marks and teacher opinions about writing. This caused me to feel embarrassed and I shied away from it all. Then I found Hemingway' s The Sun Also Rises. I was hooked. It was the first time I actually enjoyed reading. The writing was simple and I could easily follow along. This snowballed into more of his work and eventually other authors. The strange thing is, after I continued to read more, I found that my writing ability was growing. This then in turn inspired me to start creating my own writing. Side note, I was a classically trained musician so I always had this urge to create.

Now I continue to write because it was once something I avoided and have now come to enjoy. It has made me a more confident person all around.
 

Jan74

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Love this question.

I was in grade 3 when our teacher assigned us in pairs to write a story. I wrote the story pretty much on my own with not much help from my partner(which was fine by me, we are still friends to this day and she just let me fly.) I wrote a ghost story on foolscap paper front and back oh jeeze at least 8 pages maybe even more, it was very long for a grade 3 student. I wish I had kept that story. But that is my first memory of falling in love with writing.
 

zmethos

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I was always telling stories in one way or another. I would write out these little "magazines" for my neighborhood friends--I'd copy out half a dozen of them. My best friend was four years younger than me, so I would tell her stories all the time, too. When I moved away, she and I would write stories back and forth to one another. I still have many of those letters . . . somewhere . . . I've moved a lot since then, so a lot of my old life is packed in boxes.
 

DanielSTJ

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Grade 2 assignment where you got to illustrate a yarn.

Mine was about two of my favorite stuffed animals: a monkey and a penguin.
 

DougR.

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I've been creating stories since I had an imagination, first with my action figures and stuffed animals, then paper and dice RPG games. I wrote a few things when I was in my teens, but nothing that caused me to take writing seriously. After college, I jumped from one online RPG to another until I came across one that I became utterly addicted to. It was a society-simulating RPG with no NPCs. Basically, you were in a fantasy world, surrounded by other real characters, and everyone contributed to the story. It was living, organic story writing, and I'd never experienced anything like it. It took over my life emotionally, until my things fell apart. I had to quit cold-turkey, and had this hole in my creative soul. The only way I could cope was to begin writing where the characters in the RPG left off. That launched my serious writing career.
 

RWrites

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I was always an avid reader and writing came easily to me. I would read every day and soon wanted to start writing whenever I could. I began when I was very little and over time I took breaks, but my passion never went out for the craft. I enjoy writing every single day, even if I don't always finish what I start.
 

ancon

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i grew up in a place where people weren't in too big a hurry and would take time to tell stories to each other...and they were good at storytelling. sitting on the front porch kind of stuff. gossip. telling tales. lies. i started out trying to say things with drawings, paintings, etc, and then found words/stories were the best way. a lot of room on a stack of blank pages. i liked the freedom of it or something.
 

thehansell

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My best friend when I was eleven bought a Harry Potter book into school. Since he was about ten percentile points cooler than me in the school hierarchy I decided to find out what all the fuss was about. I read Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone in about a week and it was like discovering a cave inside my head full of shiny jewels and fire breathing dragons. To me the power to blow someone's mind through stories and imaginary worlds became the single coolest tool in the human toolbox.

I've spent the last sixteen years figuring out how to do that.
 

Lucid

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I started with fanfiction in 2006. I loved it, but it always kind of bothered me that I was so in love with something that would never be mine. From there I really always had this yearning to create my own thing. Eventually I fell away from fanfiction and spent a lot of time drawing. I hung around social art sites like deviantart and there were always people with their own characters they'd made up and they had these elaborate backstories and then... there was me. Doing fanart. I continued to crave my own thing and never had any ideas, but basically I've just been hungering for something of my own, and always wanted to write even though I dragged my feet about it. Just waited for the right idea to come along...

I'm finally doing it now!
 

Odile_Blud

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I dunno, I just started doing it, I guess. Didn't really like a lot of books that were currently published so there was that "if you want it done right, do it yourself" sort of thing. Not to mention I've always had a big imagination.
 
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tofiwillis

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I spent a summer with my grandparents where they wouldn't let me turn on the TV. I had never read a book before. I might have been six. I walked around everyday aimless and bored and grandma said, 'we've got a bookshelf you can go through.'

As soon as I had read all the books (they'd let me read), the boredom returned, so I started writing my own stories.
 

pat j

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Not necessarily asking what the first thing you ever wrote was, but I've found that a good way for me to get past my writers block has been for me to actually look introspectively into my past to find out what got me into writing in the first place.

So how did all of you get into writing to begin with? I'd like you to share your work if you happen to have it still lying around (unfortunately I don't.).

=============

First I had to learn HOW to write. Schools from elhi through the uni did not teach me how to write. I had to learn the hard way when I had to write for my job. I had to invent my own process that actually worked to succeed with that. Now that I am retired I hope to expand to writing novels for fun instead of white-papers for business.
 

A.P.M.

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I hated writing as a kid. I remember telling my third grade teacher I didn't like writing. Why? For whatever reason, writing by hand is physically hard for me. I was the kid who had to go to remedial classes specifically for my handwriting. Writing legibly was WORK. I read a lot, and that always got my creativity flowing, but I play-acted my fantasy quest stories with my stuffed animals instead of putting the effort into writing.

Despite that, I had moments starting in fifth and sixth grade where I just had to write down my ideas. I got my handwriting under control enough to write legibly, even though it was really hard. I didn't write long things, but the things I wrote were decent enough to get noticed by teachers and get the second highest score on the school-wide writing exam.

Then I learned to type in middle school, and got a computer of my own in high school. Suddenly I could write all I wanted and it wasn't hard anymore. First came the fanfics, and then all my fantasy novel ideas started forming into actual books and not quests carried out by toys.
 
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MaeZe

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NaNoWriMo a few years back, someone said they were doing it so I gave it a go and just never stopped writing.
 

Helix

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there is a power in discovering you can pee a word or sentence into pristine white snow.

if you can pee a sentence, you might be a writer. if you can pee a paragraph, you may have real talent.

dickens and poe, twain, kipling, et al, they could all pee an entire book into a snow bank after a night of drinking, and could care less when it melted away. but that is genius talent. i've left out gifted female writers out of this dumb post out of respect.

dearie me
 
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