What's the story behind how you started writing?

[MidnightMorpher]

Oh boy, something I can answer with detail! Honestly, the first time I started writing fanfiction was when I was nine, and it wasn’t even fanfiction, it was just me writing a story about going to a hotel with my friends, because hotels were literally heaven to me at that age.

I posted my first fanfiction when I was 13, and it can go die in a fire. I’m only half-joking. It was an utter travesty of a story, and it makes me cry-laugh to this day (no I’m not going to post the link here, I’m not ready to die yet). I’ve been posting fanfics on and off to this day, and after that first one, I’ve been posting mostly Pokémon fanfiction. Started with Trainer fics, and eventually moved onto PMD fanfics, which I’m enjoying way more now. But I’ve been thinking about returning to Trainer fics one day...

I used to write PMD adaptation fics when I first played the games, and since my creativity bank at the age of 16 was about the size of a grapefruit, I followed the plot line VERY closely. I’m doing better now, but back then it was a nightmare thinly disguised as a fun story haha.

Not all of my fanfics were posted, however. About 90% of the stories I wrote are still in notebooks hidden in a dusty drawer, taken out only when I need to make myself feel better about my writing now /s

But in all honesty, writing for myself sometimes is fun, because I get to be as shameless as possible and write blatant Marty Stu in other fandoms that I wouldn’t dare to write in otherwise. So... yeah, I guess that’s how I started, writing all these years until now, and I don’t regret one second of it.

— MidnightMorpher

 

[DarkerShining]

How I started writing? Well, since I was little, I've always had quite the imagination, and always liked coming up with stories in general, making up personalities for my various toys and making up the stories as I played with them. Then after I began spending time on a computer, when I wasn't playing PC games, I would often write stories on it for my own amusement. Some of the stories tended to relate to whatever I was interested in at the time, so I guess I was writing fan fiction before I even discovered what fanfiction was.

Indeed, I think I realized pretty early on that I wanted to be a writer when I grew up, and I continued to write (often silly and nonsensical) stories for my own amusement. Then after I began spending more and more time on the Internet, and discovered fan fiction, I guess I was pretty excited.

So, after I first joined Serebii.forums at the age of thirteen, I naturally wanted to try writing fanfiction on my own, and I would come up with several ideas, and even tried writing some, but I never ended up posting any of it because I just wasn't satisfied with anything I wrote. After all, this was very different from just writing silly stories just for fun. I needed to improve my writing somehow, but I wasn't sure how. I spent the next few years just doing stuff, focusing on school, looking up various things about fiction and such, and at some point, discovered TV Tropes. Finding it relevant to my interests, it became another one of the sites I regularly spent time on, and then in 2011, I came across this play-by-post Pokémon roleplay that had recently started up, and ended up joining in.

I made some new friends in that roleplay, and tried to work on improving my writing along the way. At one point, when we were planning a future storyline for said RPG, a certain thought occurred to me, and I gradually began developing that idea, incorporating some ideas for characters for previous stories I hadn't written, and a story began to take shape. Eventually, I finally had the first version of the first chapter. It wasn't perfect, but twenty year old me felt confident enough in posting it, and so, on April 7th 2012, the first chapter of Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Reflecting Balance was posted. I had finally done it. I had finally posted my first fanfic!

And that about sums it up, I guess.