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What inspired you to write?

What inspired you to write?

  • Reading books

    Votes: 19 54.3%
  • Films/games

    Votes: 4 11.4%
  • Other

    Votes: 12 34.3%

  • Total voters
    35

TheokinsJ

Troubadour
I've never been a reader, all my family read a heap but I never really got into it. I don't know where my inspiration to be a writer came from, probably 'The Lord of the Rings' films and video games, a combination of both. I've often wondered if it's rare for a writer to not be a reader- I've probably read about ten or so novels in the past five years, (Not including the texts I read for school). What inspired you to be writers? Was it reading a book or was it something else?
 

Jabrosky

Banned
I've had a creative streak as far back as I can remember, which is around ages four to five. Most of the time I would express this through drawing, and still do, but like most people I always appreciate a good story too. In addition, most of the standardized tests I have taken (e.g. SATs and IQ) have reported that I have above-average verbal skills, so I figure a career as a writer would play to my strengths.
 

Ireth

Myth Weaver
I got bitten by the poetry bug at the age of six, and from there I've progressed to writing novels as well as poems.
 

Butterfly

Auror
My dad, would make up stories at bedtime instead of reading them. Maybe the storytelling comes from him.

I started writing my first book at about aged 10, got three quarters of the way through it, until a better idea came along.
 

C Hollis

Troubadour
I've had stories running through my head for as long as I can remember. Twenty years ago, I made a feeble attempt at writing, but life/kids/wife/work/fun distracted me.
A few years ago I took a creative writing class at college, basically to get three credit hours out of the way, and I believe that is where the inspiration took. That class was actually the genesis of a couple of my published short stories. The other students and the professor encouraged me to pursue the craft.
I suppose hearing those words of encouragement from people outside of my personal circle attached a bit of credence to what I had been told most my life.
I have to laugh. I sit here, in my office, taking a break from the pencil edits of my second book, and I get reminded this awesome ride started with a "blow off" class in school.
 

Ankari

Hero Breaker
Moderator
Dungeons and Dragons. I used to make up my own quests (instead of buying pre-generated ones). I loved creating backstories and motives for the antagonists. But D&D is limiting in that things don't play out like you waned them to. I derived two lessons from that:

1) Become an author

2) Not everything is clear cut and make sense.
 

Rinzei

Troubadour
Mine was film, TV and games. When I was 11, my friend introduced me to anime, drawing, RPGs and roleplaying in IMs - so those four things have always been closely tied in my mind. I would have loved to develop my writing to be portrayed in video games actually.
 

Philip Overby

Staff
Article Team
I guess I have a mixture of reasons I was attracted to writing. Like Ankari, I played D&D when I was a teenager and that got me interested in creating things. Before then, I wrote poems now and then. I really got interested in writing my own fantasy stories after reading The Legend of Huma (a Dragonlance book) by Richard A. Knaak. I went on to read more and more Dragonlance, mostly Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman. R.A. Salvatore was next. Later on, I got more interested in worlds outside of D&D universes. I started writing "weird" stuff, mostly horror. That's when I really got deep into writing myself.
 

Addison

Auror
Inspiration is everywhere and pretty much everything. I get plenty of inspirations from movies, games and books, but most of the time and idea will pop in my head while I'm doing something completely unrelated. Like I had an idea for an epic-word and sorcery fantasy while baking cookies. But if I get inspired by a book or other media then I have to wait a while for the characters and tone of that media to fade so I can clearly see my new idea in my head.

What inspired me to write in the first place......I actually don't remember. The first story I wrote was in the third grade. The hero was the reincarnation of a mystic knight with ghost-ninja body guards in an old colonial mansion complete with a garage full of ATV's.

Yea, weird. But that wacky, juvenile story was the start of my writing life. No more weird stories like that, but plenty of WIP's. Which I need to get working on. See ya!
 

T.Allen.Smith

Staff
Moderator
As a child, the stories of Jack London fascinated me. He was the first author I emulated, as a young teen. So, the idea of being a writer bloomed early.

Since then countless books, movies, even games, have fed into this dream even though I became serious about the craft only within the last 7 years.

I never have been able to understand how some people say they want to be writers if they don't read, and read a lot. My brother-in-law is one of those, yet he's never written a thing. He claims he doesn't want his ideas to be influenced by outside sources. Hogwash, in my view.

To me, that equates to a musician that's never been into music. I'm of the opinion, that the list of successful musicians & composers, that don't listen to loads of music, all the time, is quite small.

Art, like anything else, builds off of the work of those that have come before us.
 
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ecdavis

Troubadour
I think mine began in Junior High in an English Class, and then all my nerdy friends found AD&D and along with that came all the classic Fantasy and Sci-Fi books which we all devoured as teens. As a Dungeon Master, I found it really easy to create story lines for characters and our D&D characters had a lot of life to them -- by this I mean it wasn't just create a random dungeon, assemble everyone, kill everything, get the loot and that was all. We created where they lived, some of them later on had children who became characters -- stuff like that.

I was always fascinated by the Drow series of AD&D modules and it was a favorite for the players in my gaming group. Though I got out of D&D not too long after high school and only wrote a bit of Sci-Fi and some very poor Horror stories, I always had in my head an idea for a story with a Drow. It took me over 20 years to come back and try to write it, but thankfully I read Salvator's Drizzt series first and found that a large part of my idea had been used by a far better author.

So when horsing around with a copy of Baldur's Gate (or maybe it was Neverwinter's Night) on computer, I found the back story made a new Drow story pop up in my mind about a Drow girl raised from shortly after birth by humans, far, far away from her people. The story idea turned into a book, and now it has spawned a trilogy and a whole world that has a multitude of story ideas in it that I'm working on. So I guess I'd say it was reading and D&D for me.
 
Actually, nothing inspired me to start writing. Or maybe if you count the fact that your mother own a typewriter and the sound of it is awesome so you (10 years old or so) find it really fun to write on it.

I never being a reader until recently nor a gamer. I just aways liked to write. And that is something that I realised only a couple of years ago. You know, in those sudden inexplicable burst of memories.
 

Scribble

Archmage
Reading.

When I was a young boy, I read Charlotte's Web, The Hobbit, countless "How and Why" books, encyclopedias, and just about anything I got my hands on. This put me on a trajectory to be a reader all my life.

In my early teens, I found a wealth of literature in the downstairs book case. Hermann Hesse, Albert Camus, Dostoevsky, Huxley, Orwell, Wells, and so many others. These books blew my young mind, opened me up to human desire, suffering, triumph, and defeat. It opened me up to live the lives of other people, in other places and times.

This stuff was pure magic. It filled my head with so many ideas, they feed new ideas, and they want to burst out. There's only one thing I know what to do with it... write.

I am not sure why when I put pen to paper that it is sci-fi and fantasy that comes out. I only read it sparingly, having a hard time finding any that suits my tastes, preferring to read classics or non-fiction most of the time.
 

Penpilot

Staff
Article Team
Probably from Comic Books, TV, and Movies. Everything inspires me. I grew up in the '80 where war-toys were the big thing. There used to be tons of commercials, but not all the toys had shows to go along with them. I would imagine stories for those toys that had commercials but not shows. For my favorite TV shows like Star Trek, I used to write my own episodes so I could Mary Sue myself into the series as a new cast member.

For a while I pursued the idea that I would become a comic book penciler, but realized I liked to make up the story for the penciling more than I liked to pencil. One of the first stories I wrote was based on a dream. It was about crashlanding on a perpetually dark plant inhabited by a psychotic killer bent on killing everything. It's actually similar to the pot of Pitch Black now that I think about hit. :p

From then, I wrote down all my ideas but only finished a handful. But then fastforward to a course in a creative writing in college and discovering the I Should Be Writing podcast, I got into the saddle to stay. I'm always reading something, and I do get inspiration from books, but it pales in comparison to the number of ideas I get from watching TV, Movies, and just listening to people talk about the craft.
 
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A. E. Lowan

Forum Mom
Leadership
I come from a long line of Irish writers, the most recent of whom is my mother. My father is a science fiction junkie, though a slow reader. So, basically I was doomed to write speculative fiction from the start, but it would be years before I knew it. I was an early reader, and from the start I read literally everything I could get my hands on, and still do - voraciously. My mother encouraged my storytelling even before I was writing, and would type out my little stories as I dictated them, asking me leading question such as "why" and "how" to teach me the very beginnings of craft. And then, when I was 9 years-old, my father handed me a copy of Anne McCaffrey's Dragonflight and I knew what I would be writing for the rest of my life. I got into D&D in middle school, but just used it as a framework to make up my own stories. In high school my parents enrolled me in an arts school where I majored in creative writing and met lunatics just like me, including the girl who would become my writing partner and hardest editor and critic. Roleplaying now plays a significant role, so to speak, in our story generation. So, although gaming has definitely had an influence, I would have to say it was reading that brought me down this road in the first place.
 

skip.knox

toujours gai, archie
Moderator
That's a difficult question. What inspired me to write what? Write a letter? Write a poem? Write my first short story? Write my first novel (which, the failed ones or the one I finished)?

Or is the question, what inspired me to decide I wanted to be a writer? Even that is tricksy. Be a published author? Be a person who writes stories whether or not they see the light of day?

Whatever is really meant, I have to say that there isn't a single inspiration. Each story has its own inspiration, anything from "this is a cool image or idea" to "I dunno, I just want to see if I can get from beginning to end." Sometimes, I don't feel all that inspired, I just feel obligated, or maybe possessed. Doomed. Damned. Habituated.

I have to ask: why did you choose those categories? What were you hoping to learn from the poll? Why do people think polls tell them things?
 
I've told this story a few times, but there's no harm in repeating it. Someone organized a just-for-fun contest on another site--a contest to write a short work of erotic fiction. I was the only one who completed an entry by the deadline, but rather than let the story sit on my hard drive, I figured I might as well submit it to Literotica.

It got an Editor's Choice award.

I was touched that someone had liked the story so much. I felt like I ought to try writing another, to see if it was also well-received--and when that proved popular, I wrote another, and another. It's largely been positive comments--various people saying that they liked a scene or a character--that made me feel that writing was worthwhile.
 
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Svrtnsse

Staff
Article Team
I was snowing in on the topic of what happens with a fantasy world that doesn't get stuck in a medieval setting but continues to evolve beyond that. I brought it up time and again in conversation with my friends, presenting different thoughts and ideas. Then one day one of them said the magical words "you should write this down, get a blog or something". I did and that's how it started.
 

teacup

Auror
Well I don't know if it exactly counts as inspiration, but I was reading the Eragon books, and found out that he author began writing at 15. I was 15 at the time and just thought "Well, I can do that" and now I am.
I suppose proper inspiration wise, it was just the love of fantasy in general, final fantasy 9 for the world mostly, and that I loved reading, so I thought I'd have a go at writing, and really enjoyed it.
 

Trick

Auror
Actually, as a child, I hated to write, in the English class sense of the word. I preferred math. But I was always particularly imaginative and had a few friends who were also. One friend, though older than me by three years, had a younger kids approach to play and we would use action figures to act out stories that he created. Before long we we're doing comic books together. Since I'd loved to draw ever since I could hold a pencil I did most of the art and he did the plot. I learned a lot from him as he was a big reader and I was not. My art began to inspire his stories.

Then I moved 300 miles away. I had very few friends and was not allowed video games. My father started a job as a sales rep for Random House and he sold their audiobook line, books on tape. With samples laying around the house, I started listening. The Sword of Shannara was the first fantasy book I ever read/heard. As an audio learner, this clicked it in my brain. Highschool solidified it when I couldn't wrap my head around higher math without tons of work but I got A+ grades in every English course I took. One teacher developed my ability enough to make me confident and then I saw Lord of the Rings. I began writing a week later. Later in high school I was offered a chance to partner with two other students in a national writing competition for Latin classes. We had to write a story about a Roman coin and the prize was a real, perfectly preserved Roman coin. I brainstormed for a day with the other two and wrote it alone that night. They edited it and we cleaned it up. And we won. What a confidence boost!

Now, my art inspires my stories. Turns out, the Irish gene will get you even when you don't expect it. My two oldest brothers have degrees in writing and one writes full time, though it's more technical writing at this point and creative on the side. Another brother is just trying his hand at writing for the first time and he comes to me for help, which is a funny feeling. My sister won a scholarship in college through a writing competition. My father, though never a serious writer, related to me that in high school his English teacher was not his biggest fan. When he forgot about a book report he knew he was done for. With no time to read anything, he made up a book and wrote the report. The teacher liked it so much that he got his first A from him. And the teacher never knew the book wasn't real. I guess the Blarney just runs in my blood.
 
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