When did you start writing?

[starseed galaxy auticorn]

So, as the topic says, when did you start writing? How LONG have you been writing? Did it take you sometime to really get into it? Are you happy that you were able to discover your abilities? Tell us your story!

For me, I started in the fifth grade. However, I wasn't really writing much until I reached my teenage years. I started out out by writing fanfiction at first. Not long after had I gotten into more original fiction instead. I chose original fiction because I felt like my abilities were best in this category. It allowed me to create my own original ideas for stories. That's something I've been doing now for as long as I can remember.

Now, in fifth grade, I wrote a short story about my cousins meeting Casper the ghost. I know it sounds cheesy, but my teacher loved it. She even showed it to my mom. She was very proud of my abilities to express myself through writing. I think that right there is the moment when I somehow realized I had an ability. One that allowed me to express myself better than I could both verbally and emotionally. Even today, I still manage to inspire others with these abilities, despite having many different special needs. This is usually what fuels me into writing as much as I can.

So, what about you?

 

[Bay]

I too started writing a lot when I was in high school and I was writing mostly original fiction that consisted of mysteries and historical fiction (the joys of cable, dial-up internet, and CD rom encyclopedia, lol). It wasn't until my senior year of high school I found out about fanfiction and that's what I've been writing mostly. So opposite of pikadots, lol. Lately I get more ideas for fanfiction than original fiction.

 

[Nolafus]

I actually started really late when compared to everyone else. I hated writing anything pretty much my entire schooling career. It was all about essays and business writing, so I never really took an interest in the creative side. I joined the Writers' Club, since a few of my friends were in there, and I started to get a bit of an interest, even started to write an idea that never made it past chapter two, but I never took it seriously.

Then one summer day I decided to watch District 9 on tv, and an inspiration took over me as the credits rolled, and I realized I wanted to make a story like that. So I plotted some things out, and began to write. Over a year later, and I had completed my first novel attempt. It's wasn't good, but it was a start. I've written a few short stories since then, but most of my ideas are for novels. I've taken writing seriously for about three years now, and although I still have a lot to learn, I like to think I've made decent progress in my little time.

 

[VisualJae]

I started writing as soon as my skills in math deteriorated and I realized I was just better at writing than other subjects in school. For American high school students, the SAT was the test to prepare for. Scoring perfects across the board in both reading and writing (despite ending my essay in a comma due to running out of time) while achieving an average score for math continued to convince me that math might not be my forte.

I didn't write seriously at that time anyway. In fact, I really didn't take anything seriously in school. I was more of the go out and have fun kid. @#$% homework!

In college, though, I started off in economics and finance, requiring proficiency in math. Nope. Charts? Nope. Formulas and statistics? Nope. Side note: I do like tracking statistics, though.

So I switched out to liberal arts and started really getting into writing. My voice changed constantly as I explored different subjects, but everything sounded way too scholarly for my personal liking. In the end, I just BS'd my way through. If there's one thing I learned in higher education, it's that as long as you write what your professor expects to hear/read, you're golden. There are exceptions, of course, and those tend to apply to the more non-traditional professors (my favorite types).

I graduated with dual degrees in English Literature and Rhetoric, and Global Cultures, primed to be a scholarly writer. Screw that. That ain't fun. I'll write what I want.

I think one shining moment I had was when a close friend of mine wanted to participate in a novel-writing contest hosted by Amazon a few years ago. Except he told me about this less than a week before the deadline. I helped him write, develop and edit his novel in three days. All 350 pages of single-spaced, size 12 Times New Roman text.

Sure, the quality probably sucked compared to the polished submissions that were done over the span of a year, but hell, 350 pages of plot and character development in three days? That was a lot of fun. It was great practice to just get everything down on paper and stop worrying about what could or couldn't work. That can be reserved for the editing process all the way in the end, which we did. Writer's block wasn't an issue. It was a long stream of consciousness.

Fast forward to today, even though my main line of work doesn't involve a whole lot of writing (and ironically, more analytics and number crunching and tracking), I'm having a blast with the visual novel I'm working on during my free time.

 

[Margot]

I started writing as a kid, though I don't recall what grade. It didn't start out as writing per say, but stories that made with comics and pictures. I made a lot of "magazines" about various topics. So while it wasn't strictly writing, I've been coming up with stories since I was in elementary school.

Once I got into high school and learned what fan fiction was, I began writing a lot of that. Lots of Pokeshipping and Contestshipping. I also wrote a few pokemon fics as well that never got finished which is a shame, I kind of liked them as bad as they were. I like the idea of trying to write another pokemon-oriented one-shot but I'm so bad at battling sequences.

Lately, when I find time I've been writing a lot of short stories/original fiction. I think I'm stronger at short stories, it's why I wrote a lot of one-shots in high school. I would like to challenge myself and write something a little longer though, I'm just not sure about what.

 

[Arylett Charnoa]

I've been writing ever since I first got a computer. Which was at 10 years old. My writing has never materialized into fully fledged stories, more like snippets of unfinished content. And about 90% of it was original. Never was interested in fan fics. What I wrote the most is world building and lore. I still have the documents from all those years, and they are LONG. I spent hours and hours, it looks like, trying to flesh out almost everything. I'm still as ambitious as I was before, with loads and loads of content in my Google Drive waiting to be spun into a story. A very lengthy one that will become a series, and will someday be finished. Oh and I dabbled in poetry too, because a lot of my writing was also various explorations of my feelings and emotional states. I've become rather good at describing that sort of thing in vast clarity.

But I don't really consider myself a writer. Because I don't write for the sake of writing. Writing to me is nothing more than the most effective and quickest tool I can use for my expression.

Honestly, I prefer writing with a partner. It helps to motivate me far more and a partner can make up for the weaknesses I have in certain fields. So I'm more of a collaborator/roleplayer, really.

 

[Purist of Black Water]

Been writing since 2011. so five years.I had that time in my life, when I thought I was hopeless at everything.
Learned the craft and researched a lot, sometimes hours on end.
I am more a poet/poetry teacher than a stories writer.
I can't write stories for the life of me, except in poetic form.

 

[Sonata]

I've been trying to write since I was in 5th grade so it's been like... since 2007 or 2008? Obviously nothing I wrote then was worth anything, but I was a lot more attentive to what I was actually writing. There was one story I had started writing, some really weird combination of final fantasy x and percy jackson and the olympians that I somehow had managed to work out. I woke up before school every day and would either write a page or read over the page I wrote the day before and edit it changing things that didn't make sense or adding in more details. After about a year I was sitting at thirty pages of crappy intermediate school level writing and a very high level of edginess. After that I didn't really start writing again until high school. My freshman year I wrote a movie script for Biology which the teacher said was really creative and well written so she kept a copy of it. Then I think I tried to write some crappy love story after watching one of my now favorite anime in my sophomore year, wrote some poetry my sophomore and junior year then came back to try and write another book-length story my senior year and continued it until now with sporadic updates and rewrites.

 

[Aisu]

Well, I wrote little snippets of stories in early elementary school, but I didn't start writing actual ones until the fifth grade I believe. Some superhero story about me and my friends that I thought was so cool back in the days, but now when I look back I think "Damn I was a corny kid." (But I still have that same notebook even as it's all yellow and torn from age, so memories. Reminds me to stay humble lol.) But uh, I didn't start throwing around real books until the summer of eighth grade, where I really examined authors' writing styles and tried to make my books look like, well, books. It was when I started getting really harsh with myself about writing, always wanting to do better and better even if other people said it was great. I need to give myself a break sometime soon haha.

 

[gimmepie]

I've been writing since my earliest years in primary school. I've had teachers tell me for years that I'll be an author (they were wrong as it turns out lol). I've always loved to tell stories but truth be told I'm not amazing at actually writing though so I don't do it as often anymore outside of RPing.

 

[Aurora]

I like to write and have been writing since before primary school. I don't have as much time to write nowadays thanks to school but I will still write whenever I get the opportunity. A lot of my primary / early high school stories were somewhat farfetched, incorporating zany plotlines and elements, but I like to think I have refined my craft to be more realistic now!

 

[FangTheQuilava]

In all honesty, I didn't start writing until a little bit before my second semester in high school, when I was taking Creative Writing Class. A while after that, I began writing stories, but when I really shined was when I unleashed those skills to the class, and created a laugh-out-loud comedic story in the class. Although they didn't laugh much, at least they saw where I was going with it. Later on, I went to begin writing a fanfiction about Star Fox, which stopped after Chapter 10 because it begun to feel... forced. I also wanted something new. So, I began trying my hand at a Pokémon fanfiction, based on a mix of how I make my OCs and how Mystery Dungeon stories work.

 

[Enasencca]

If I remember correctly, I started writing since the 3rd grade, though I only started pursuing it seriously when I was eleven or twelve.