How did you start writing?

Too much energy as a child. I could not fall asleep so I started thinking up stories. It became a past time. Later, much later I told some friends my stories and they suggested I start writing it down.
That's how I got into it. I kept doing it until I was satisfied and showed some people my work and got some good reviews, so I kept at it. No one said, don't quit your day job at least.

I showed a client in the film industry my work and he ended up asking me to write a screenplay for him. I hesitated but he was persistent so in the end, I did a re-write for what he had. Don't know what happened to that but I kept at my novel. Getting good feedback was really helpful. It is was little daunting still, I kept asking people who were in the business to be truthful. It helped me improve.
It also got me an agent and publisher. Happy to say my novel comes out next year. It's called The Dragonglass Bowl.

I have to say, I listen more to the criticism. It's easy to hear good things about your writing but it did not help me. Friends tend to be kind. Looking for someone I did not know as a friend was better. They are not afraid to tell you about the bad spots.

I think, looking back, keeping my imagination going was what helped me but I started late. Now I just love writing. I love to read as well of course and kept reading the genre I liked most.

It's been an unexpected journey for me but one I do love.

Caroline

I had the compulsion one day long ago to express my thoughts.

I was seven the first time I thought about writing. My primary school teacher gave us a project. We had to construct our own book of short stories and there would be a competition at the end of it all. I found it thrilling to discover a freedom I never experienced in real life on the page - words may have been confined to four corners of paper but my mind, the landscape was rich and sweeping and unlimited. Looking back I was pretty egotistical, manically so, and I thought the competition was in the bag. I didn't win and my fragile and pathetic ego didn't let me pick up a pen to write a story until I was in my twenties. Thankfully I have a much more grounded, humble head on my shoulders these days.

Voices woke me up one morning and made me sit down at the computer.

Turned out pretty good but still needs a sit down with my editor for polishing. PM me if you want to read it (Historical fiction centering on colonial/revolutionary era with lots of other elements fitting into humor and thriller among others).

I've always tended to live in my head and I've loved reading for as long as I can remember; it opened up all sorts of worlds I wanted to visit. So, around fifth grade or so, I started putting myself into the stories I loved. Or at least I tried to with varying degrees of success. In middle school, I was writing "books" for my friends to read, and I just never stopped. I'd like to quit, it's been a frustratingly long road, but the stories keep coming. At this point, I figure I'm a 'real' writer even if I never get published.

I've always been a daydreamer and one hell of a bookworm. One day, almost out of compulsion. I thought: hey why not, I'm combining two of my passions!? After that it was just all a matter of refining things and taking away the many, many many impurities in my story and writing.

My very first book was 4 pages and stapled together by my mom. It was about birds taking a bath, and I think I was 6 (?) or something like that when I wrote it. When I was not much older, I got a special notebook where you could write a story on the bottom and illustrate it at the top, and I worked on it bit by bit until I was 11 or 12. It was called "Crazy Days with Rosie, Addy, and Mary," and I'm thinking about using taking these characters and remaking the story into some MG fiction.

My father died relatively young, leaving such a mess, hahaha. I didn't know him as well as most people know their parents, so I based my MC on him in his youth and young adulthood to see what I could find out.

Well, I've always been a creative person, and always a fan of the arts. Even as a child I was a movie fanatic, I started playing drums at six-years-old, very musical. When I was in second grade, we had this assignment in English to write a story. I'd never written a story before. But I knew I wanted to write a scary story, since I was very much into horror movies. My brother had shown me Halloween, the 1990 It, and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (the Kenneth Branagh movie). So I wrote a story called "Night of the Zombie", and I loved the process of writing, of thinking of these images and putting them on paper. I also loved how I became the 'horror kid' at school, and some of my stories scared my classmates. I guess I kinda enjoyed that aspect of it; that just by scribbling words on some paper, I got the reaction I'd kinda been hoping to get. Simple equation, I guess. I write a scary story an my classmates get weirded-out. I soon started writing 'novels' (because when you're nine, if it's over a hundred pages in a Hillroy school notebook, it's automatically a novel). By the time I was thirteen, I'd written four novels, and since my number-one dream was to be a musician, I also wanted to be the lyricist for my imaginary band, so I wrote my fair share of poetry/lyrics, as well.

Now, if only I could get an agent...

I discovered I liked (and was relatively adequate at) writing thanks to one of my teachers when I was 13. He was exceptionally passionate about literature and language, and he took the time to read and crit every text analysis and book report of each and every student. Sometimes I swear his red ink over our pages would out-word our wordcount--his scribbles would run out of space and he would start writing vertically, and then horizontally upside down at the bottom. To read him you would have to slowly spin the page 360*. He was a mess in that aspect XD. I have actually created a character based on that man, and the feverish way he graded our papers.

He justified absolutely everything and gave tips to improve. He wasn't liked by many of my peers because he was so strict. His standards were much higher than some of his other laisez-faire coworkers'. But I'll tell you, those red words of fair and intelligent encouragement and overhyped praise when I did things right really got me into writing.

A toast to all of those education professionals that go that extra mile, love what they do, and that believe in their students enough to push them. Thanks to that man I found one of the great loves of my life. I only wish I had told him what it all meant to me--sadly, I didn't fully know it back then. I hope he hasn't given up on us "children" just yet, wherever he is!

I think I actually started writing a story way back in sixth or seventh grade, but it didn't develop into anything. And when I was in college, a lot of my professors enjoyed my writing style.

But what got me really going was working at a boring factory job. One day I was hit with inspiration, and my first novel was born. I developed the entire novel in my head in just one afternoon, and completed my first draft shorty after.

In the ninth grade, I started submitting essays that were stories. Even did it for some college papers. Eventually I decided I may as well as just give it a try as actual, intentional fiction, since I kept doing it.

Here's an answer I prepared earlier.


The black bird has been with me for a long time - more than 50 years now.


I think I first saw The Maltese Falcon in around 1963.

My granddad was a big Bogart fan, and I remember long Sunday afternoons spent sitting at his feet watching movies on the tiny black and white TV that was the norm back in the UK in the early Sixties. Back then everything was Britain was still in black and white - the Beatles were about to change all that, but Bogey would stay eternally gray and eternally Sam Spade for me. Even at that early age there was something about the snappy dialogue and the larger than life character that spoke to me.

I saw the film several times before I got round to reading the book - aged around 12 so about 1970. In much the same way as the film had, the book also spoke to me, touched something in me - the stuff that dreams are made of if you like.

When I started writing for myself, back in school, my voice was heavily influenced by teenage longings - I hadn't learned enough of the ways of the world to be confident and sparse, I wanted to be flowery and intense and intellectual.

University, then ten years of being a corporate drone quickly drummed that nonsense out of me. I developed cynicism and from that my own voice started to emerge, enough to ensure I could cope with being an adult but not yet enough to turn me into a writer.

The booze did that. Booze and nightmares and a new wife that understood me better than I did myself.

The booze is part and parcel of being brought up in a working class environment in the West of Scotland. Beer came easy to me in my late teens, a love affair I still have to this day. Whisky I had to work a little harder at, but I persevered and developed a taste for single malts that means my habit is largely curtailed by the expense. It doesn't mean I don't get the thirst though.

The new wife came along in the late '80s a couple of years after the old one and I realized we didn't really get on very well and went our seperate ways. Sue saw that my drinking was getting out of control, and liked me well enough to help me do something about it. 28 years later, she's still helping.

The nightmare? I've been having it off and on since I was a boy. It's of a bird - a huge, black, bird. The stuff that dreams are made of.

In the nightmare I'm on the edge of a high sea cliff. I feel the wind on my face, taste salt spray, smell cut grass and flowers. I feel like if I could just give myself to the wind I could fly. Then it comes, from blue, snow covered mountains way to the north, a black speck at first, getting bigger fast. Before I know it it is on me, enfolding me in feathers. It lowers its head, almost like a dragon, and puts its beak near my ear. It whispers.

I had the dream many times, and always woke up at this point.

Then, in 1991, I heard what it said.

"Will we talk about the black bird?"

The next morning, for the first time since 1976, I wrote a story. It wasn't a very good story, but something had been woken up, and the day after that I wrote another, a wee ghost story. It didn't have a black bird in it, but it did have some jazz, and a sultry broad, a murder and some dancing. When that one made me 100 pounds in a ghost story competition, I was on my way.

The bird comes back and whispers to me every couple of years - I've come to think of it as my spirit guide.

Although it terrifies me, it also reassures me in a weird kind of way. As long as it's around, I'll still be a writer and not just a drunk with weird ideas he can't express.

Will we talk about the black bird?

I went to a Montessori elementary school, where fiction writing assignments are a normal part of the elementary curriculum. But it didn't occur to me that I could write "real books like a real author" until I was in 8th grade.

I don't know how I started... I know that I was always making up stories. Before I knew how to write I'd dictate them to my mother. As soon as I knew how I started writing (rather poor) stories. Then I had my first writing class in 4th grade and decided I just wanted to do that forever.

I suppose I was jotting down a few stories fairly early — remember one about a pirate when I was seven-ish — all elaborately illustrated as art was more my thing than words for a long time. I may not have written much out as a kid but I definitely created rather elaborate scenarios in which I would cast my friends and neighbors. Now the neighbors won't play so I have to create my own imaginary friends, er, characters.

As for actual serious writing, I fell in love with the essay form first (I guess I had a lot of opinions about things) in my early teens and that led me eventually to writing magazine articles. I consider that my apprenticeship, where I actually learned the craft of writing and prepared myself to eventually tackle fiction.

I don't think there was ever a time when I wasn't creating stories, but what really got me into writing was the introduction to fandom.

Yes, I was a fanfic writer first.

My first fandom was Sailor Moon, back in '95, and it was the horrible DiC dub, but it was the best thing I had ever seen. I was 9, and growing up with Power Rangers and Ninja Turtles, and all these teams of guys, to see a team of girls, fighting evil, with magic sparkles, who loved and supported each other, even as they had their fights and disagreements, was....well, to be frank, shocking. I'd never seen nor heard of such a thing as shoujo anime and from there, I was hooked. I made my first fanmade character, though I didn't know it at the time, and started making up dozens of stories about her. I begged my mom for extra notebooks come back to school time and in the backs of the ones devoted for class, I would write small snippets and doodle in the margins.

Then the internet happened and everything just kind of exploded.

Needless to say, fandom eventually gave way to my own, original writing, although I still like writing fanfic from time to time. Mostly I read it, to see how people use their creativity to twist things, to add things, to explore areas the author didn't even think to go (Harry Potter is a big one for this). It's amazing how much fanfic can change canon and make it something almost completely original. I think fandom taught me more about writing than any class I took in college, to be honest. So yeah, fandom did it to me, haha.

I started writing as a child because I loved to read, but when I became a teen I stopped for some reason. I became more focused on sports and girls. When I went to college at the age of 24, I fell back in love with writing when given an assignment to write a narrative essay. I remembered how fun it is. Now I don't want to give it up again.

I started writing in my childhood, in a diary. At the beginning, short daily notes. Then a lot of thoughts, even short essays.
Writing is the best way to handle my imagination, which needs a way to refresh from time to time.

I've been engaged with stories since infancy. My father and his father before him were storytellers. I'm just the first my family line to start writing them down. But the spark to write stories was sparked in the 6th grade by raw envy. A student in my sixth grade class wrote a little short story and bound it in construction paper, and shared it. Everyone oooed and ahhhed and the teacher was proud...and another student decided to write their own. I can't say I was impressed by either story, nor their stick figure art work, so I decided that I would do better now that i knew what the "bar" was. So I did, and so did three fourth of the rest of the class. In the end we had a stack of about 30 or 40 stories in our "library" at the back of the room. From that point on I wrote little occasional pieces, mostly poems and short plays that I read and performed for family. They were not that good. I became serious about learning how to write late in college (got honors for creative writing). After finishing college and entering "the real world" my BA qualified me to sweep floors at a car dealership. I started seriously engaging the craft in a more deliberate (get all the best books on writing) way, and I have made incremental progress since then....many many years ago.

I was used to writing research publications that go thru reviewers before being accepted. Most of the Good Journals are refereed. Referees decide the fate of article. Many good ones like Science have over 80% rejection rate. So I had to learn to write effectively or face the rejection. Books I started writing much late and that's because of my interest in these nonfiction topics....

When I was about ten or eleven, I snuck a peek at my sister's PC and found a word file. It was her attempt at writing. It was interesting enough that I tried to replicate it and gave up shortly after. It took another four years or so until I started writing again.

It's fascinating how many people started at a young age.

Personally, I was horrible at reading, and writing? That was beyond me in grade-school. My parents had to literally bribe me by the page to get me to read a book. On the other hand, I loved to draw and my first collection of consequent drawings (of Dogmatix from Asterix) I did when I was knee-high to a grasshopper. I wrote a couple of illegible captions, so I guess that constitutes my first book. But seriously, my attitude to writing (equating it to a visit to the dentist) didn't improve much until I somehow ended up in a creative writing course in university.

I was an avid reader as a kid. I remember there being rewards programs at school where they would try to encourage kids to read at least ten books over the summer(I would always roll my eyes at that. Ten? I could plow through that many in a week). I had read (and reread) every book in the house- or at least every book appropriate for a ten-year-old to read. I was in need of some new books to read, but there weren't any. So I decided if I couldn't find a book I would like to read, I would write it instead. In all fairness, I never finished any of my stories, but I enjoyed creating them, and even entertained my siblings with some of them to the point they were begging me to write more so they could find out what happened next. Those early stories were awful, with gaping plot holes, but I did like entertaining other people with them.

I got a crush on a character in someone else's book and started reading fanfiction while I waited for the next book in the series to come out. Then I started writing fanfiction. And then a piece of fanfiction I was writing got out of control and wound up being 50,000 words long, and I thought to myself, "Hey, I just wrote a novelette. If I can write a novelette, then I can write a novel. Why don't I?"