Another post got me thinking....

When I was 10 I decapitated my cousin in a car crash during a race.

That was the first story I ever remember telling and my imagination has never stopped working since.

Btw, you should have seen my grandfather's expression when I came back from the race and told him Jerry had his head cut off after crashing his car. I think it was that reaction that motivated me to keep going, but it was my mother's chastisement that convinced me to convert from lying verbally to "storytelling on paper."

All these decades later and now I find myself wishing that had actually happened to that bastard.

It's a unique personal and intellectual challenge that has, as its judge and jury, a population of strangers. Please them if we can. Thrill them if we can. Put a ring-of-words through their noses and lead them on our journey, if we can.

NeuroFizz said:

It's a unique personal and intellectual challenge that has, as its judge and jury, a population of strangers. Please them if we can. Thrill them if we can. Put a ring-of-words through their noses and lead them on our journey, if we can.

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Mmmmm. I like this one.

I was eight. My best friend was writing a class play, and I wanted to do one because she was. Ironically, she joined a creative writing class in eighth grade, and never wrote again. I wanted to join the class and was turned down by the counselor because I "wasn't capable of handling it." Next year, I took second place in the school essay contest.

Christyp said:

What got you started on writing?

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Boredom. I was an asthmatic kid and forced to sit quietly for hours on end after a bad attack. I read a lot and when I tired of reading other people's stories I began making up my own.

Kateness said:

What got me started? No clue. All I remember was that I wrote my first book in second grade about an apple that ran away from the apple tree and got run over by a bus. I illustrated it and everything.

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Pretty much exactly like this. I would always want to write, just make up stories and live them out on paper. My first book was almost exactly like Kate's. Except my story had golden apples

I had never taken writing seriously until junior high school when I guess I was about eleven or twelve. We'd had to do some stories for school when I was younger, but I'd never thought much of it. I remember writing poems on the bus on the way to a field trip in fourth grade, but even that was just something dorky we did for fun. The same day we were trying to figure out our own secret codes, so it wasn't like something I see as a seminal moment for me or anything.

I think I started writing because I loved to read. I was one of those kids who carried a book everywhere I went, and it never really occurred to me until I had a teacher who had us do an assignment for class and I realized whoa...I could actually write my own stories!

I wouldn't say I have a God complex at all. Escapism, yes. It's just something I enjoy doing. I love exploring new places and experiencing things that I would never otherwise be able to do (or want to in some cases lol). And when I was a kid, I realized how awesome it would be to share the same love of reading I'd always had with other people.

Christyp said:

What got you started on writing?

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ROALD DAHL
&
Dr. Seuss

I was the firstborn child in a large extended family. No other siblings or even kids for several years.

So I grew up among adults, tried to read their books when I was six and had to have a Harold Robbins novel removed from my little hands. Books were just inherently fascinating, and I started scribbling down stories shortly afterwards.

That, and I'm a control freak. When things in reality became difficult, I could escape into worlds that I made up. I could plan what happened and make sure it was carried out. When my mother died and my father married again a few months later, I wrote a story about a man who did the same thing. Except it turned out to be an elaborate plot where the first wife faked her death so that he could marry an heiress and murder her for her money, eventually ending up with the first wife again.

Is there a psychologist in the house?

Ahem. But yes, that's why I started writing.