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What's the story behind how you started writing?

The Great Butler

Hush, keep it down
Maybe that title is a little wordy. I'm asking, what got you started writing? We all have our own motivations for what started us down this path, and I'd like to see them get shared.
 

roule

take it all or leave it... I Feel You
Honestly? To pass time in study hall. That's literally it.
 

Kutie Pie

"It is my destiny."
I'm trying to remember exactly what it was, but I'm feeling like it was around the time I was able to write (sometime around Kindergarten) that I was coming up with silly stories. I'm actually trying to remember which came first: the oh-so-original idea involving hamsters on adventures (thanks, Hamtaro), or the Calvin and Hobbes fan-comic about Calvin temporarily making an oven mitt his friend after Hobbes was taken away as punishment. Or none of the above because I was writing random things down in a notebook before I discovered Microsoft Word and played with JumpStart Typing (God bless you, JumpStart) that taught me how to type.

But what was the final push into writing for good was discovering the Serebii forums and its fan fiction when I was about thirteen. Or actually, I think I might've already known about fan fiction prior as I once found a fan site when I had to have been about eleven that had a whole section on Cardcaptors, and there were links to fan fics people would send in. I also want to say I discovered Team Rockets Rockin' at that time, too (and a couple of others--most of them were actually Mewtwo fan sites now that I think about it), and saw their section on fan fiction, and I started writing myself even though I wasn't a member of those sites. But it was the Serebii fan fiction subforum that finally got me to sign up for the sole purpose of sharing my work, and the rest is history.
 

Samayouru

Rabid Dusclops Fan
To sum it up briefly? Ever since I first picked up a pen and wrote words.

But to elaborate, I guess I could start by bringing up a name I'm sure older members are very familiar with - and that name is Yami Ryu.

I was about eight or nine when I discovered Serebii Forums and the fanfic community, and it blew me away that other people wrote about pokemon too. My biggest mistake was then proceeding to ignore any of the rules and type up a couple of sentences in a new topic post thinking it was the best thing ever. It was there I met Yami Ryu, who completely destroyed me, followed by the mods locking the topic. If it wasn't for her, however, I don't think I would've become as determined to improve at what I do as I am now. It's just a shame I never got the chance to thank her for what she did. :<
 

Dragonfree

Just me
I've been making up stories for as long as I can remember. It started with games that had elaborate stories and drama (deaths! betrayals! torture! loss of self! fates worse than death!) and just sort of naturally proceeded from there to writing them down. I've got notebooks with stories in them from when I was seven, but that's just after I learned to write. My brain just... does stories.
 

Starlight Aurate

Just a fallen star
I'm sure older members are very familiar with - and that name is Yami Ryu.
;_;

I'm mostly the same as some other people here; I started writing stories every since I was a little kid. I was about five years old when I made my own book by coloring and writing on pieces of paper and then stapling the backs together--I think I called it "Cat and Dog are Friends," or something like that. It was about how a dog saw a cat and wanted to be friends with her, but the cat got scared because she thought the dog would eat her so she ran up a tree. The dog told her he was nice and convinced her to come down, so they showed each other tricks they could do (the dog could spin a ball on his nose, and the cat could catch mice).

I heard friends at school tell me about fan fiction and how awesome it was, and then I stumbled on Serebii forums. I started writing a story, wouldn't listen to older members kindly pointing out its flaws, and had the thread locked. After a couple of years, I pulled myself together and learned the importance of humility and started writing one shots and some other fics.
 

Cometstarlight

What do I do now?
When I was in Kindergarten, Powerpuff Girls were the big thing and I LOVED PPG. I drew them any time we had free time in class. It got to the point where I decided to make a book out of stapling drawings together. It was about the titled girls finding and fighting a vampire XD Never finished it, but the memory of it still sits with me.

I guess the more modern reason comes from reading really good and really bad books. Some books just captured my imagination and it really inspired different stories in me, while I read other books that took the stupidest turn you can imagine. It was at times like those where I wished that I could write a different way for those books to turn out. Then I thought, why couldn't I do that? When I got to college, I was undecided on my major, but was leaning toward Zoology (which I ended up choosing). After some encouragement from my English professor, I took a fiction writing course, then another, and then another to the point where I'm now minoring in English.

I don't have as much time to write anymore because of coursework, but it's always been my dream to write a book.
 
Came up with an idea one day, realised it would never be canonised. Wrote a small thing in like an hour at midnight, never proofread or edited it. It wasn’t that good. Took a hiatus until I thought of a “cool” concept for a longer fic and wrote nearly all of it before realising it was terrible and became pretty damn sad and unmotivated. Got back into writing after that with a couple of shipping one-shots, the rest is history.

If you want the longer story and not just how I got into fanfic writing... I guess I’ve always liked making little stories. One I remember from when I was really young was this story about all these Gargoyles being scared of an intruder to the castle they stood on, only for the intruder to just be really nice. I dunno what really got me into it, I guess I’ve just always loved words. One big motivation that makes me go “Hey, you might actually have something with this” what that a story I wrote inspired by my dog when I was eleven and submitted to BBC 500 words in 2016 (so like a year later) got put into the final 4500 Stories before eventually getting eliminated, which is quite far tbh. I also quite like writing poetry despite never doing it, since I kind of have a knack for that flowery non-rhyming type stuff, and I got into that because one time in class we were asked to make a poem about if we were a fish, and my teacher loved my poem to absolute pieces so I realised I coild do that more.

Yeah that’s my story, I guess it exists, now all I need to do is live up to my own dreams and actually damn write more.
 

The Teller

King of Half-Truths
I seem to recall me reading a lot of bad erotica and thinking "Man...even I could do better than that!" And so I wrote. I was around 13 at the time. Long story short, it WAS better, but only by a little.

...

...ehhhh, hmmm, something more child-friendly a reason...hmmm. Oh! I, too, found myself writing during study hall when I should've been finishing up my homework! Y-yes, that's it. I-it's not like I still have my decade-old, yellowed, original stories, written on loose-leaf paper and pen, time-stamped and stashed away somewhere!
 

Kutie Pie

"It is my destiny."
I seem to recall me reading a lot of bad erotica and thinking "Man...even I could do better than that!" And so I wrote. I was around 13 at the time. Long story short, it WAS better, but only by a little.

lol XD

That's why I decided to write Forsaken, actually. I developed a love-hate relationship with the romance genre after reading one of my mom's books one summer (when I shouldn't have, honestly, but I was bored), and just about everything I was reading since was pretty much the same old thing you'd expect from fluffy romances, and I was getting sick of it because "That's not what real romance is about!" (said a 17-year-old with no boyfriend). So I had decided to make up something, and it took about a half-a-year's worth of planning before I got it to where it would (eventually) end up. I still have that love-hate relationship, but now I channel that into laughing at bad smut/erotica.
 

Bay

YEAHHHHHHH
Like many others, I did get started writing with lose paper that I stapled together. I think it was a "dog finding a home" story many kids would think of, although I remember I was inspired by a book we're reading in school. There was then I would write my stories in notebooks, one I remember being a murder mystery and the main character going to be in a relationship with the detective in it haha.

In terms of fanfiction, I wrote like a couple script fics and then Heart of the Sea was my first long fic. Man, the tense switching and English is my first language lol embrassing.
 

Misfit Angel

Vengeful Ferret
My first experience with creative writing was when I was about four years old. I'd recently learned to read about a couple weeks earlier and I was so captivated by these worlds that could be created that I wanted to create my own. Unfortunately, my first story is lost to time and I don't remember what it was about, but I'm pretty sure it was god awful in every metric one could measure writing by, including what my letters looked like.

I only really took creative writing seriously as a passion when I got into 6th grade. My English teacher thought I had a talent for it and suggested I join the school's writing club. I didn't stay with it for long because I hate being social, but it sent me down the rabbit hole that has led me to this point; every year I spent in school since joining that club, I've had teachers congratulate me on my creativity and writing abilities... I don't know how much of that was just platitudes, though, rarely did they engage and encourage me further. >.>
 

diamondpearl876

Well-Known Member
Heh, I see some trends here, especially among a lot of writers that have been here for a long, long time. ^^ That's pretty cool. ONCE YOU WRITE, YOU NEVER STOP WRITING.

My story's a little... depressing, unfortunately. I started when I was young, too. Pokemon was a thing me and my cousin really loved together, and my mom and my aunt would indulge in it by buying us lots of cards, figures, etc. My mom got sick and passed when I was 9, but she was in a hospital for a year or so before she did. If I wasn't in school, I was visiting her in the hospital, and I would write Pokemon stories in spiral notebooks to pass the time. Writing was the only thing that helped me get through all of that, honestly, and my family who read my stuff encouraged me to keep doing it. I did stop for a few years at some point, but I picked it up again with Survival Project and Pokemon fanfic is still my go to to feel better and work through things at age 24. I'm okay with this. Probably explains why my stuff is character-driven and emotional, at any rate.
 
My writing story is actually pretty simple to talk about.

Take a look at my thread history, and you'll see a really old fic called Convergence. That was my first work of fiction. EVER. Granted, me and my best friend would make made-up Bionicle stories when we were little, and even made our own little action figures (it was a different time), but I'd never written anything down until Convergence. I've also been a Pokémon fan for a long time, but actually sort of fell off the wagon for a while after Platinum, only getting SoulSilver almost a year after it was out and BW was right around the corner.

So, reality is, I was very late to the writing game when compared to a bunch of people here. The only real advantage I had was that I was a stickler for grammar, so my prose was somewhat okay. I had zero concept of what really constituted good storytelling, and just had a bunch of weird ideas floating around in my head. Hell, sometimes I still feel like that. Compared to many people here, I'm an amateur.
 

Manchee

extra toasty
Samayouru said:
It was there I met Yami Ryu, who completely destroyed me, followed by the mods locking the topic. If it wasn't for her, however, I don't think I would've become as determined to improve at what I do as I am now. It's just a shame I never got the chance to thank her for what she did. :<

Aww :/

I've wanted to write since I was young, but I never knew what to write about. I remember in kindergarten I wrote a story for class called "The Great Easter Bunny Mystery" that didn't make a lot of sense but I still have it, which I think is cool if I ever publish anything for real. I didn't start fan fiction writing until I found these forums, and the results were horrendous, lol. I forced myself to stop for a bit and I read other things that people wrote, namely DJ:HoH (for anyone who was around back then and can remember that fic), which showed me a lot about how to write a trainer journey and make it interesting.

I stopped writing my fic when I went to college, though. I won NaNo twice in college, and the second time is what I see as the beginning of my current writing - there is a clear shift between that and what I wrote two years prior for NaNo. I did NaNo again last year, but other than that haven't done a lot of writing in general because of school and laziness. I'm going to be trying a few new ideas out, though, so we'll see where that ends up (okay, I'll stop rambling)
 

bobandbill

Winning Smile
Staff member
Super Mod
My writing first arose from an English homework task back in year 7. Had to write a script, and so I wrote a not-terribly-original one about two people called... Bob and Bill. :V I found it fun and did a few more, which my friends enjoyed to read. I tried another one a while later but that didn't go very far either, thought about another comedy script parody (Wizard of Oz) but never really started it. These were all offline.

Around that time a good friend gave me a spare copy of Pokemon Colosseum he somehow had, which to this day we don't know where it came from. I quite enjoyed it, and then I thought 'hey, maybe I should try a parody of this as a fic'. I had read some fics back on the old trsrockin.com site, and a couple here afterwards, so I had some sort of idea. I put up my first chapter (or prologue), happily got a nice review, and tried some more. At some point its popularity exploded to the point of a tvtropes page which still astounds me, and some 4+ years later I finished the dang thing. That'd be my proudest writing achievement.

Nowadays while I am intending to do more fic work this year most of my writing has been Pokemon articles (news, guides, analysis and soon hopefully more creative ones) over on PC Daily which I'm co-running, following cutting my teeth on a different webzine (BBS Magazine/Wynaut?). I've done a bunch of one-shots of varying quality, a 3-chapter fic, another chapter story which needs reviving, and a 'drabble dex'. Lots more for myself to learn about writing stories but I'm content with what I've done and am doing to a large extent.
 

Crystal

The Pokemon Observer
I was quite creative in new story creation even when I was young. But the first time I ever open a new word document and start writing down my original story idea and truly devote into writing the story out, was began from the time Pokemon Anime stop airing in the TV channel of my residing country, and at the same time I started reading the Pokemon Special manga series. I was at high school around that time.

I can't recall anymore the reason what drove me to began my fanfic hobby. I can only recall some of my very amateurish romantic Mary-Sueish (for sure! :)) Pokemon journey daydream back at that day where I was like "Hey, this must be interesting if my adventure expand to a full-length story", then suddenly I found myself sitting in front of the computer and jotting down ideas for my very first virgin work.
 
Similar to a lot of other stories here I started writing really young, but the one that really stuck to me was these stories I would make where the characters were me and my classmates in grade school. It had superpowers and other fantastical stuff like that and I’m pretty sure I still have all those hardcopies stored somewhere in my room.

Fanfic writing on the other hand started here, and I remember stumbling upon it back in around 2008 and really committing to the idea of, hey, fanfics are great, when I met some great people in the forum. That’s carried over to why my studies and current work are all writing-related and it’s a bit funny when I think about it that way.
 

BrennaFullen

New Member
From early childhood I loved reading books, perhaps it inspired me to write my own stories. From the very beginning, I started writing college papers, I like this type of work most of all. That's why I can help you with college papers at college papers writing service, you just go to where you can use this function, I hope it will be useful for you.
 
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