# At what age did you begin to write?



## philistine (Jan 12, 2012)

Excluding diaries (where one writes for oneself... hopefully), and letters to family, friends, etc, when did you begin to seriously write? 

For me, I began to write shortly before my twenty-first birthday. It had never occurred to me beforehand, and one day, an idea came into my head, and I had an overwhelming compunction to write it down. 

It was a short story that would later be titled _Business_, in which a young man and his uncle are walking down the street. Like many male children, he believes the men in their family to be supermen, who are better than every other. This ends when a destitute drunken chap in the street-- on his way to conduct some work, or business-- slights him with a racial epithet, to which the uncle withdraws a pistol and shoots the man dead. He continues as if nothing ever happened, shattering the impression he had heretofore given out.

It was received well, and low and behold, a penchant for writing was born. 

How about you? :joyous:


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## Walkio (Jan 12, 2012)

I started writing my first novel when I was 15 during my school summer holidays. I did it to stop my parents hassling me to get a holiday job.


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## Sunny (Jan 12, 2012)

I started writing 10 months ago. I don't remember writing in anything but diaries up until that point. My punctuation, my grammar, and my run-on sentences were atrocious. I spent hundreds, and hundreds, and hundreds of hours studying my books on my shelf, learning how the authors that I read would structure their sentences and what words they used that captivated me. I read 80 books a year at least, so I just sort of instinctively knew how the flow of a story should go. I wasn't very good with knowing when to add in a comma; I either used too many, or not enough. I didn't know that you were supposed to use a comma before a quotation, and right before the quotation ended. I had no idea that the semi colon could even be used, or when to use it. I taught myself so much about writing by reading writers blogs and helpful _how to _sites, that I feel I have a pretty good handle on the whole concept now. 

It all started with my best friend. She had decided to write a novel, thinking it would be fun because we loved to read and discuss books so much. She must have worked on her book for a year before I was finally able to convince her to let me read it (she was embarassed and didn't want anyone to know she was writing). She finally emailed it to me one night after my relentless bitching that I wanted to read it. It showed up in my inbox, and I read the first two pages and it hit me. _If she can do this? So can I. 

_So I opened up another window in Microsoft Word right then and started plotting out what I would want to have happen in my book. I started writing that night having no clue what the heck I was doing, but I kept at it, I kept writing every chance I got. I became obsessed with it, and thought about it, and my characters all the time. I wrote my first novel of 145,000 in only two months. 

So I haven't been writing very long at all. But I feel like I've been doing it my whole life. I love it, and I can't imagine not doing it. ;0)


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## Offeiriad (Jan 12, 2012)

Sometime in high school. Don't remember exactly which grade, though.


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## candid petunia (Jan 12, 2012)

There was a thread about this before too. But for those who don't know, my first poem was written when I was in 6th grade. We had a project on environment and the things we'd discussed at school were buzzing in my head even when I got back home. As I was getting ready for my afternoon nap, I felt a poem come to me. I was too afraid to get up and jot it down because mum was very strict about naps after school. When I woke up later, the poem was fresh as ever and I wrote it down then. 


I wrote on and off while I was at school but they were all in jest. I started writing what I considered serious poetry after my 12th grade, but my poems took a more mature tone after I joined this site. Looking back now, the 'serious' poetry doesn't look so good. :topsy_turvy:


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## garza (Jan 12, 2012)

There were many ages when I started writing. Here are a few.

My grandfather got me started writing poetry and short sketches before ever I started school. He died when I was ten but had laid the foundation. By age 12 I knew I wanted to be a writer. At 14 I began writing for two local newspapers. At 16 I was paying my way at university stringing for a dozen papers. At 21 I quit school without my phd and went to Southeast Asia where the Vietnam conflict was beginning to boil, kept up my old contacts, and added news syndicates. At 25 I returned to the U.S. where I fathered a child and became more involved in magazine writing, especially about the Civil Rights movement and the growing anti-war protests. At 32 I made a last trip to Asia, then was handed full custody of my eight-year-old son whose mother said 'I can't take it anymore'. At 42, with my son safely launched into his chosen career in construction, I went back into the field, this time in Central America to cover the civil wars. At 55 I retired. At 56 I was asked to write a book. At 57 I retired. At 58 I was asked to write a book. At 59 I retired...

I'm 71 now and darn it, this time I mean it. I'm retired. 

Hello? Yes Minister.....


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## candid petunia (Jan 12, 2012)

It must be something like this: You might be ready to give up on writing, but writing isn't ready to give you up.


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## josh.townley (Jan 12, 2012)

I wrote my first story, called 'The Big Hat', in about the 4th grade. I can't remember what it was about, but I think it had something to do with a big hat. My teacher liked it so much that it was read out at the school assembly. 

After that I don't remember doing much writing, other than English assignments and things like that. In Year 10 a friend an I started writing a novel together. I had the original idea and wrote the first chapter, and he liked it so much that he went ahead and wrote the final 300+ chapters, or something like that. I have no idea what that one was about.

About one year ago I decided that a 9-5 job wasn't for me as it took me away from my fiance and my daughter all day. I decided then that I was going to write a novel and do everything I could to make something of a career out of it. Life is too short to spend all your time doing something you're not passionate about.
So, I've been writing seriously for almost a year, and I absolutely love it. Hopefully the novel will be finished in another 6 months and then the real challenge begins.


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## ClosetWriter (Jan 12, 2012)

garza said:


> There were many ages when I started writing. Here are a few.
> 
> My grandfather got me started writing poetry and short sketches before ever I started school. He died when I was ten but had laid the foundation. By age 12 I knew I wanted to be a writer. At 14 I began writing for two local newspapers. At 16 I was paying my way at university stringing for a dozen papers. At 21 I quit school without my phd and went to Southeast Asia where the Vietnam conflict was beginning to boil, kept up my old contacts, and added news syndicates. At 25 I returned to the U.S. where I fathered a child and became more involved in magazine writing, especially about the Civil Rights movement and the growing anti-war protests. At 32 I made a last trip to Asia, then was handed full custody of my eight-year-old son whose mother said 'I can't take it anymore'. At 42, with my son safely launched into his chosen career in construction, I went back into the field, this time in Central America to cover the civil wars. At 55 I retired. At 56 I was asked to write a book. At 57 I retired. At 58 I was asked to write a book. At 59 I retired...
> 
> ...



Garza I am impressed. I would have to had some of your experiences.


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## ClosetWriter (Jan 12, 2012)

Sunny said:


> So I haven't been writing very long at all. But I feel like I've been doing it my whole life. I love it, and I can't imagine not doing it. ;0)



I know the feeling.


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## Gamer_2k4 (Jan 12, 2012)

I've wanted to tell stories for as long as I can remember.  The first independent work I remember was a comic strip called "Weirdo and Zord" that I started in second grade (I would have been 7 at the time).  It followed two space pilots on various adventures and was pretty simplistic, but it was something.  My next work was "Jared and Terry," a not-funny, not-well drawn copy of "Calvin and Hobbes" that starred me and one of my own stuffed animals at the time.  I had maybe 40 double sided pages of it, but inexplicably threw it out one day when cleaning my room.  Several more, shorter-lived comic strips followed; I'm sure I could dig them out of my drawings folders the next time I go to my mom's house.

After that came amateurish attempts at actual writing.  There was a fantasy story about a couple of dwarfs that lasted maybe three pages, a sci-fi story about humans invading a distant planet from the aliens' point of view that didn't get past one page, and a lousy version of Star Wars called "Future Attack" that went for a few chapters.

My next efforts at breaking into the creative field came through game design.  Collectible card games, board games, dice games, video games - if it had the word "game" in it, I tried to design one (or more).  They were always based on my favorite game at the time, such as the original Star Wars CCG, or computer games like Descent and Colonization.  No game got past the planning stage until high school, when I began my Reptoran series.

Labyrinth of Reptoran, Adventures in Reptoran, and World of Reptoran together were a conceptual roguelike RPG trilogy.  I put more effort into that series than I had into anything else before.  The initial concept came around freshman year in high school (14 years old) and lasted until junior year in college (20 years old).  However, it was about that time that I realized I just wanted to tell a story, and having to wrap everything in programming just bogged the process down.  With that in mind, I moved on to my first (and current) novel.


*TL;DR SECTION*
I've been designing my story since around April of 2007, and I actually started writing it in January of 2009.  I've been working on it ever since.  I guess that makes 20 the age I began real writing, although, as the above paragraphs indicate, the creative spirit was active well before that.


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## beanlord56 (Jan 12, 2012)

Almost exactly three years ago, give or take a few days.


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## garza (Jan 12, 2012)

candid petunia -Truth to tell, it's good to feel I'm still appreciated, and further, that I can still contribute.

Closet Writer - Sometimes I wish I could do it all over, but then I think, nah. It's almost time to write '-30-' on the page, put it on the wire, and get a long nap.


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## C.M. Aaron (Jan 12, 2012)

I was in my late 20s. I don't remember why I started. I think I was bored and looking for a new hobby. That was about 20 years ago.   C.M.


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## AvA (Jan 12, 2012)

Started around two years ago. Had a fling with fan fiction, then fell in love with fictional prose. Unfortunately, I fail to appreciate what poetry has to offer.


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## Gardening Girl (Jan 12, 2012)

I started writing less than a year ago (at age 45).  I wrote my first short story two months ago.  I’ve always enjoyed writing but only in the form of many long letters to family overseas.  I often received many encouraging comments and people loved my letters which were very long and more like stories.  I don’t know how it happened but it just did and I began writing about nine months ago.  I don’t know why it happened.  But I’m glad it did.  I never knew this was what I was meant to do but now I know that it is.  It consumes me but I love it and I get enormous pleasure from it.  It seems to be exactly what I am meant to do at this stage in my life so for now I’m running with it.  I know that I have much to learn but even those experiences energize me.


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## The Jaded (Jan 12, 2012)

Only lately have I felt able to share anything I've written with anyone, but I've been a writer for as long as I can remember, even back to when I was a child. In something like the fourth grade I was lauded for writing "several grade levels above" where I was supposed to be in short assignments, because even then I was reading full-length novels and from them I learned how to make English look the way it was supposed to, without all the stumbling about in grammar lessons to get there.

Since middle school I've kept notebooks full of incomplete story ideas, just sort of waiting in the wings. I never really let anyone see them, not even my closest friends, because let's be honest, I was a teenager and thought everyone but me was an absolute jerk, thus I suspected all they'd do was mock my pitiful efforts at writing. I even looked for the most anti-creative field of study so I would never be tempted to pull anything out of the notebook stack and submit it for public humiliation. I went into computers, which eventually became a career, safely set apart from anything creative. But I couldn't stop writing. I was a sort of creative sleeper agent, I guess. That's... well, most of my life has elapsed like that. I have not the capacity to act sane and not write, so the notebook pile kept growing.

I still have those original notebooks, actually. I occasionally pull concepts and story ideas from the incomplete projects in them - "Virtual" (a short story I wrote last year) is one such idea, which has its roots in a weathered notebook almost ten years old.


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## The Backward OX (Jan 13, 2012)

candid petunia said:


> my first poem was written when I was in 6th grade. We had a project on environment and the things we'd discussed at school were buzzing in my head even when I got back home. As I was getting ready for my afternoon nap, I felt a poem come to me.



Ye gods and little fishes! A nap at that age? Maybe you meant siesta? When I was that age....


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## Jon M (Jan 13, 2012)

AvA said:


> Unfortunately, I fail to appreciate what poetry has to offer.


Sound and connotation, for a start.


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## philistine (Jan 13, 2012)

Interesting responses. As you were folks.


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## candid petunia (Jan 13, 2012)

The Backward OX said:


> Ye gods and little fishes! A nap at that age? Maybe you meant siesta? When I was that age....


Okay, I didn't get the difference between a nap and a siesta. :scratch:


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## rachelwrites527 (Jan 13, 2012)

Technically I was five.  I wrote stories about my family or anything really.  Granted they would only be three or four sentences.  Later, in about fourth grade, I started writing short stories.  I wrote the first words to my first novel in seventh grade. Around eighth grade, I put it down and worked on several other projects.  Tenth grade, I picked the novel back up, changed almost everything about it, and I'm nearly halfway into it.


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## garza (Jan 13, 2012)

candid petunia - A 'nap' is what folks in my age group have on a hot afternoon following a nice lunch and a cold stout. A 'siesta' is what people in a more productive time of life have on a hot afternoon following a nice lunch and a cold stout.

Naps are also popular with babies who are not concerned with fine linguistic distinctions.


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## Kyle R (Jan 13, 2012)

AvA said:


> Started around
> two years ago
> Had a fling
> with fan fiction
> ...



You just wrote a poem without even knowing it (I just helped you with the line breaks). ride:

Poetry is underrated. Poets are the true artists of the written word.


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## helium (Jan 14, 2012)

I've started writing 7 months ago out of nowhere for no reason. Just wrote the most random and incoherent stuff because it was fun. And still writing it today


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## candid petunia (Jan 14, 2012)

garza said:


> candid petunia - A 'nap' is what folks in my age group have on a hot afternoon following a nice lunch and a cold stout. A 'siesta' is what people in a more productive time of life have on a hot afternoon following a nice lunch and a cold stout.
> 
> Naps are also popular with babies who are not concerned with fine linguistic distinctions.


Thanks for the clarification, garza. 



KyleColorado said:


> You just wrote a poem without even knowing it (I just helped you with the line breaks). ride:
> 
> Poetry is underrated. Poets are the true artists of the written word.


Haha so now we have "Poetry is in the mind of the line-breaker"? :topsy_turvy:


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## Grape Juice Vampire (Jan 14, 2012)

I've always had a love for words, and my vocabulary has always been extensive. I started with poetry at six (granted not very good poetry) and was writing short stories by eight. By thirteen I'd won a few poetry contests, and was working on a novel. And had caused some controversey with my poetry. I'd written a poem from the point of view of a murdered woman dumped under an over pass and submitted it to my schools literary mag. It didn't get in, (it got picked but the school had a fit) the school sent me to a counselor but my teacher pinned the poem to the notice board so everyone could see it. Poetry is my first love in writing but i don't write it as much as i used to. I've since scratched that first novel and have been working on my current one since I was fifteen. I've only been seriously working on it for the last year however and it has gone through huge changes. I'm about half way through technically, right now i am currently stitching everything together.


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## Hawke (Jan 14, 2012)

My two siblings are ten and eleven years my senior. Growing up, the competition for our parents attention was fierce. They had in their arsenal their vast ten and eleven years of life experience. All I had was my imagination… 

Okay, so I went a little overboard there. Truthfully and with my sisters having lives I couldn’t relate to, I was practically an only child and had to amuse myself somehow. So I’d tell what my mom’s overly dramatic reactions lead me to believe were some pretty good stories. Eventually, telling turned to writing and…well, there you go. 

I can tell you when and why I first wrote a more serious work, an actual “work” work. I was around thirteen or so. It was summer. I was board. I read John Saul’s _Hell Fire_, loved it, something sparked, and I remember thinking _I could do that_.


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## Robdemanc (Jan 14, 2012)

I was a child when I first started writing my own stories.  I used to type them up on my mother typewriter then fold the pages and make my own cover.  They were mostly about monsters etc.   Then as a teenager I went through a phase of writing my own versions of films or tv shows.  Then as an adult at about 30 I started my own work of fiction.


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## ProcrastinationStation (Jan 14, 2012)

I first started writing when I was 12. I remeber my parents were watching a movie, the Horse Whisperer, and I had no interest. 

I had previously told stories all the time, especially for getting out of doing work and it was really only at that point that I sat down myself, unrelated to school or anything else and wrote something just for fun.


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## Gamer_2k4 (Jan 14, 2012)

candid petunia said:


> Haha so now we have "Poetry is in the mind of the line-breaker"? :topsy_turvy:



It's truly sad how many people legitimately believe that.


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## Doodally (Jan 15, 2012)

On and off for several years. Probably when I was 12 or so. I would do a couple of months, then give up, or leave it be for a year or so. I'm 21 nearly (in feb).


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## CrystalDreamer59 (Jan 15, 2012)

I started writing when I was about 12. I was greatly inspired by the cartoons I grew up watching as a kid such as pokemon and my interest in the paranormal (or whatever you want to call that stuff). My early ideas were terrible but as I got older my writing skills have improved and now my stories aren't as bad. I have finally succeeded in finishing a rough draft of a short story I've been working on, which is a huge accomplishment since I have a short attention span. In the future I plan on writing a novel series, but right now that is in the planning phases as I also have two major non novel projects that I'm working on one of which I hope to have done by this fall.


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## Anders Ämting (Jan 15, 2012)

Jeez... I must have started when I was in, like, first or second grade? I remember my first story concerned a monster of some sort. It was green and reptillian, IIRC. After that I drew my own comic books for a while. I must have started to seriously write fiction in something like fourth-sixth grade, I think.


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## Carlin (Jan 16, 2012)

I started last February. And I'm in my late twenties now, so I guess I started kind of late, but looking back, I think, I've always experienced the world with a writer's personality and perceptions, even though I wasn't writing anything down.

Since I was a teenager, my brain has been inclined to twist my ideas of the world into aphoristic sayings or jokes or short monologues and though this was never written down, I guess, my creative writing gears were churning, in a sense.

Over the past year, getting my thoughts down and progressing in my craft have been extremely fulfilling and I wish I started earlier.


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## MaggieMoo (Jan 18, 2012)

I told tales verbally... Before I could write.  I remember concocting stories in my mind as young a 3.  I have a wicked long term memory.  But my first writing experience was at 10.  I had written 3 poems and 2 short stories for a school project, with high standards from the rest of the class, for my imaginatioin.  According to my teacher it was just my lack of vocabulary and grammar that held me back from a masterpiece.  Some things never change, so thousands and thousand of years later I am still writing.


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## MeeQ (Jan 18, 2012)

Age unknown: no interesting story to tell. I write now, yay me!


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## The Backward OX (Jan 18, 2012)

70-ish


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## Artdecovampire (Jan 22, 2012)

I started to write, beyond what was required at school, when I was twelve.  I had a very inspirational English teacher who encouraged plenty of creative writing.  He had long hair, a beard and wore flairs.  It was the early 1970's so he looked pretty cool compared to my other teachers in their jackets with elbow patches, flannels and brogues.  I composed my first horror story for him, which was about a medieval vampire slayer breaking in to a tomb to avenge his wife's death.  Everyone else wrote a few pages about quite banal subjects.  Between the end of Chapel on the Sunday and sundown later that night I had written half an exercise book full of gory slaying, half naked virgins and muscular, sword wielding knights.  I had clearly been watching too many late night Hammer films when I should have been asleep.


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## Japanny (Mar 6, 2012)

Technically I started writing stories when I was five, just two years after learning to read.  My first story was called The Mother`s Day Surprise, about a fox.  I started writing my first novel, Unei-Macrea, when I was 8.  It was about a girl named Meg who learns that she is a merfolk/human hybrid, able to exist on land and in water.  I finished it within a year at 257 pages, but the computer crashed and it was lost forever.  Recently I have started rewriting it, and it is much better.  It's amazing how much my writing skills have improved in only 6 years.


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## Bloggsworth (Mar 6, 2012)

Seriously at about 64 and 9 months.


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## squidtender (Mar 6, 2012)

7th grade, so about 13 years old. That was my first year of creative writing class and at the end of the year, the teacher picked the best story from all of her students. I won. I never looked back after that, couldn't stop writing. I never thought I had any talent for it, and still believe that to this day, despite everyone around me saying the opposite. Then again, what writer doesn't think they're a hack. . .


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## Jon M (Mar 6, 2012)

I's writin on the inside of the womb, bitches!


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## squidtender (Mar 6, 2012)

johnM said:


> I's writin on the inside of the womb, bitches!



LOL:rofl:


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## KevinB (Mar 6, 2012)

The serious writing started for me at age 38. After 12 years, I'm still doing it.


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## TheFuhrer02 (Mar 6, 2012)

Around 6th grade or whereabouts.


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## sunaynaprasad (Mar 9, 2012)

I wrote picture books at the age of six, although none of them were actually original. They all were copied from other people's ideas or were copyrighted characters. One was called, "The Tale of Jimmy Frog," which followed the same plot as "The Tale of Peter Rabbit." But I was a little kid. What did I know?
Now I am writing a novel and trying to make it more professional. I found that reading books in my genre and taking paragraphs to turn into my own ideas really helped me.


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## doghouse reilly (Mar 9, 2012)

My mother, a teacher, gave me love of reading.  However, it was my high school English teacher that gave me a love for writing.  She had given the class an assignment to write an essay about a famous person.  I didn't do well.  Many teachers would have given me a failing grade and let it go at that.  She sat down with me, counseled me on that I did wrong and told me to re-do it.  I did, and received an "A."  Life interrupted, but it started me on a lifetime love of creating word craft.  Now, 50 years later and retired, I finally have the time as well as the urge to write.

doghouse reilly


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## patskywriter (Mar 9, 2012)

One of my earliest memories is lying on the floor in the near-darkness creating racing-car comic strips. I was probably three or four. A couple of years later I started drawing maps of everything in the neighborhood. I went through a poetry phase soon afterwards but didn't start writing stories until after I was introduced to the Happy Hollisters series when I was nine or 10.


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## Bruno Spatola (Mar 9, 2012)

Nine, on and off. Wrote a couple stories here 'n' there. Won a writing competition at school when I was 13. Started taking it seriously at 16.


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## Sam (Mar 10, 2012)

I started writing ten years ago, at the age of 18.


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## LaughinJim (Mar 10, 2012)

Well AvA, poetry has to offer for the reader images and beauty of language that most prose cannot provide. It allows the writer a freedom to let his or her emotions carry the poet and the reader on a short journey through the whispy clouds of the writer's innermost imagination, obsevation and feeling.

Besides school assignments, which were mostly non-fiction, I began writing at about age 25. It was generally poetry. I didn’t start writing fiction until I was about 36, I had all the tools handy but a serious lack of ideas. Everything that I started came a cropper. Most of it would wind up as soot coating the flu liner. Now, at age 49, I had to quit my job to get this surfeit of ideas down on paper or disc as it were. 

It always seems that while I am writing, as I start to ponder some solution to a problem with the piece at hand, another idea starts to blossom and I save whatever it is that I am working on and compose a couple of pages of the new idea to make it stick. Then I go back to the original piece. If anything stalls, I just go on to another piece more or less at random, make some necessary corrections and then off I go with that one. River run round and round till I come back to the beginning again.


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## Dramatism (Mar 10, 2012)

When I was 17, in October 2010.  But, I first started writing utilizing pictures from sims 3.  Like this







I only stopped doing that in about December since the game stopped working with my graphics card with an update (I know, stupid).  So, I started writing without pictures and I like that I can take it where pictures couldn't take me.  LOL, if you read my anthology right now you'd see that.  It's so weird.  Plus, now all my characters don't have to be good looking.  I always did that with sims, since who wants to see pictures of ugly sims?  Not me, and I don't like creating them to look ugly.


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## CalebTheWriter (Mar 10, 2012)

I started writing five years ago, excuse me if I use the cliche, give or take a few days. like many others have said I don't know why I started writing. I remember when though. I was walking down the hall and an idea came to me about story. I wrote it out with bad grammar and with no idea what craft meant. It was actually a good story. I never finished it though. I continued to write and study about writing. Since I was young, around twelve to thirteen, when I wrote my first story it was fantastical thing, filled with aliens and futuristic worlds that in my mind were vivid and exciting, but on the page fell flat as is the case with many beginning writers. Now I write about more mundane things, things closer to home in reality. I believe writing well about mundane existence is more exciting because we can see ourselves in it. Today, I write the truth and I write it the best way I know how, because writing is about making real life interesting and life changing by showing people the things they missed, things they may never have seen without the writers nudge.


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## SilkFX (Mar 11, 2012)

I had a third-grade teacher who incorporated creative writing into her syllabus so my first stories were responses to simple writing prompts. The following year (fourth grade) I became a target of bullies and my response was to withdraw deeply into myself and my imagination. Between fourth and sixth grades I wrote almost nonstop. I used to say I'd written three novels by the time I entered junior high, but in reality it was one short novel and a couple of long novellas. Sadly my most productive period to date took place before life happened to me in the form of college. It's been almost 30 years since and I still dream of being able to write the way I did when I was a kid... :grey:


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