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Why did you start writing?

Seira

Minstrel
It's just something I've always done and never been able to give up no matter how much I've tried. How it developed it interesting though.

I was not an only child, but an unexpected one. My siblings were in their late teens and two had moved out when my Mother got pregnant. By the time I was two it was just me and my parents in the house and there was no one in my neighbourhood for me to play with so I could get a bit lonely and my toys were my best friends. I've always been fascinated with stories and would get really engrossed in movies - like I was there. I missed out on a lot of school growing up as my Mother was ill for quite some years. So my writing abilities were years behind others, but I did used to put on plays for my Mother in her bedroom to entertain her, which would be written out in gibberish extensively. Everyone thought I was going to be an actress when I was older, so I did lots of classes as a pre-teen and as a teenager. We had to write a monologue for a performance and although my performance was lacking my teacher was very taken with the depth of my monologue and how "well-written" it was for a thirteen year old. I quit acting and started reading more and learning about writing.
At fifteen my English Teacher thought I'd plagiarised or gotten someone else to write a piece of creative fiction for me because I got an A* instead of my predicted grade of an E. I had to prove I hadn't cheated by writing another one in front of her.
 

Miles Lacey

Archmage
My late mother was a prolific reader and my father was a production manager at a stationary company that once supplied nearly all of New Zealand's schools. My late grandfather was a co-founder of that company. Thus it seemed natural that I would read and write stuff as soon as I could.

I cannot look at lined paper without a pathological need to put words on it. However... I have found I am not good at writing fiction. My attempts have been a total flop thus far.

But I keep writing and will probably die with a pen in my hand.
 

Arranah

Troubadour
I was sitting outside the courtroom where my brother was being tried for the murders he committed, when I knew I had to write the story about what his actions had done to our family and myself. My parents were good and loving people. They were heartbroken and never got over it. I wanted to reveal the pain of the hidden victims of the crimes, my family. Two of the four people he murdered we had gone to church with when we were kids. Those two people were the parents of his children's best friends. All four of his victims were his neighbors. He shot them with his deer hunting rifle, a Browning .30-06 semi-automatic. His actions destroyed everything of value in my life. I wrote the story. It was published. The publisher rewrote parts of it and destroyed the essence. I could not afford to take her to court. So years later I rewrote it and published it myself, digitally, a few months after my brother died in prison. At least that way he would not get out and kill me. In the meantime I started writing fiction. I was hooked on writing by then.
 

iramesoj

Dreamer
I like to create stories, that’s all. I write for personal enjoyment and I share my texts to others because I want receive sincere critics, because if I improve, I’ll enjoy more my own stories, because they will be better.
 

skip.knox

toujours gai, archie
Moderator
I started because I was an angsty teenager and all my friends were writing poetry too. Then I fell in love with SF and started what today would be called world building, having been fascinated by Heinlein's future history and Asimov's Foundation stories. Then I found D&D and modern fantasy and I turrned around and 30 years had passed and I had boxes full of notebooks. So I shrugged and said, hm, I guess I'm a writer, let's see if I can be a published writer.
 

CupofJoe

Myth Weaver
Therapy. After an event, it was suggested that I might try some form of art to explain how I feel, to find a release. I soon discovered that I can't draw or paint and I'm pretty much beat-blind [don't know if its a real word, its like tone deaf but I can't hold a beat]. So music was out too.
That left words...
I tried poetry, but a good friend of mine is a really good poet [they make a living from it!] but I didn't want the comparison I would draw to their work [they would never judge me - they are a truly lovely and generous person]. So that was out.
That left writing**.
I quickly found that I liked writing. The sheer joy of looking at a blank screen and filling it with my ideas++. And world building, creating characters, all of it. I don't have a need to get published. I'm happy to do it just for myself.
** I tried lots of other thing along the way; pottery, silversmithing, viking re-enactment etc.
++ Okays sometimes the blank screen laughs and sneers at me and tells me to go way. And I do for a while. But I always come back.
 

Ban

Troglodytic Trouvère
Article Team
The moment I learned to scribble I wrote stories. Horrible stories lost to the mists of time, sure, but stories nevertheless. I started writing long-form in English in 2011-2012 after finding Valtheim Towers in Skyrim and imagining it as a full-fledged bandit city on a bridge. This sent me into a worldbuilding frenzy to figure out the world surrounding that city, but even before then I was writing comics and drawing maps of fictional places, although all of that was in Dutch.
 

Aldarion

Archmage
I always liked reading, and thinking about things. Problem is, I have a shitty memory, so I always was writing down facts I found and ideas I had. This turned into worldbuilding after I saw Lord of the Rings for the first time - my first worldbuilding was basically fanon of medieval Croatia getting dumped into Middle Earth. Somewhere around that time, or perhaps somewhat earlier, I also wrote outline of a story based on a dream, though I lost steam (and ideas) halfway through, so it never went anywhere.

For those interested, story in question was basically researchers going back to Crecateous period, building a medieval castle (!) in middle of jungle, and having to withstand unwanted attentions of large theropods. Dream however was much more interesting, and featured survivors of an apocalypse hiding in Pula Amphitheatre from attacks by intelligent, talkative dinosaurs (ruled by a giant T-Rex).

After that, I tried my hand at drawing a Resident Evil comic, writing a Resident Evil-based story, and few other things, but I got overwhelmed by other stuff and so limited my attention to worldbuilding, and crossovers in particular (Roman Empire in Middle Earth being my favourite topic for that).
 

Momonkiir

Acolyte
I liked to write short stories as a child, but in school my teacher told me that I sucked at writing and should stick to math -which i was apparently good at- instead. So during my schooling years I never really wrote anything and spent more time reading, playing games and watching movies and T.V. (especially anime) just absorbing the worlds and stories within them. I would note down any ideas that i liked or thought would be interesting. Because my family would move around a lot I never really got close to anyone and went deeper into all these stories and started to write my little short stories again, now inspired by the plethora of new stories I'd experienced. At one point I had about 100 stories that were 500-1000 words each that I would keep going back too and editing little bits until i liked it. Sadly I lost all those stories because my hard drive died and I never backed up my work, so they never got to see the light of day. My current project is inspired by some of my favorite works that I lost.
 

Shonen

Dreamer
I was always a lover of drawing instead of writing, I loved drawing really bad comics with simplistic words and story for many years until one day when I was drawing, I had this moment where I just couldn't think or understand how to place or balance them anymore. So I quit drawing for a very long time.

I found fanfiction.net many years ago, I was and kinda still a terrible writer, I made stories and they never got a lot of reviews, however, when MLP;FiM came out, the fanfictions were rising at the time and the show when I was watching was probably starting season 2, my closet friend asked me to at least watch the first two episodes...I was so hooked and went to read fanfics, and found the 'Human in Equestria' stories and liked them a lot, and decided to make a short romance story of 7-8 chapters...which grew to 29 chapters after getting so many reviews, over 500 after 5 years of writing.
I loved writing and while I was never and still not good, I did learn some things along the way. After that, I felt I could express myself a lot better by telling stories over drawing.
 

Alex Reiden

Minstrel
I've always written in some form. Starting in high school, I wrote campaigns for RPGs, and naturally that included some story telling. From there, we decided the RPG platforms available weren't up to our standards, so I wrote an RPG ruleset to go along with the campaign settings, which led to incorporating these settings into a broad universe across space and time, then refining the RPG into a more universal system that seamlessly accommodated all our campaigns. Yikes! Iteration after iteration turned out to be much more work than a mere novel, soo...

I wrote some short stories for the world and some scenes from a planned novel. Never went further, but writing nonetheless.

Fast forward a couple decades, and I started writing some non-related, non-fantasy short stories on a whim a few years ago. One of them had a bit of mysticism, and from there developed a full-blown magic system all on its own (okay, it was a minor side character who took over both my heart and those of my fans). So, I found myself neck deep in a full-blown fantasy work (and spin-off series) that has become my largest and most popular yet. I then went back and wrote a novella set in one of the earlier campaign settings.

I also write technical papers professionally, so there's always that.
 

Avadyyrm

Scribe
Because I had a story, or idea(s) I wanted to share with others. I also love reading so much I wanted (still do and plan to) one day publish story's of my own.
 

LadyErynn

Dreamer
I had a large imagination as a child, so writing stories came naturally to me. Then, I turned to poetry to deal with the trauma I experienced in my teen years. Stories have always been there to help me process the world, and I hope my writing helps someone else in the same way.
 
during middle school, I read two books that made me want to be a writer. One made me see that books can bring about a sense of wonder and impact you on a personal level. The other...wasn't as inspirational. I made an off-hand comment that the book wasn't good and that I could write a book if that was what it took to get published. A friend challenged me to do it. Write a book, it doesn't have to be published, but write a book and do it in a year. It took one year and I wrote, what could be described as a book of a kind. It was cliched. It was poor. But it was mine. And I had won.

But more important than the winning. More important than the quality. I came to realize that writing was fun. It was rewarding in its own right. So, I endeavored to continue onward and maybe make a career out of it.
 
I didn't start writing at a young age, I did start telling stories though. I didn't seem to pick it up from any of the adults around me since they were all a bit distracted taking care of my Mother who was very ill. I didn't understand what was going on, I just understood it was important sometimes for me to behave and play alone in my room. They trusted me to help them. I also didn't attend school very frequently until I was nine so had very few friends I could play with. So I created friends in my imagination and created magical worlds that were more interesting than the one I lived in. I would rehearse these plays for hours then perform them for my Mother.

From that I began writing them down. Everyone thought I was going to be an actress, and so did I. Until I realized it was the story-telling I loved, not the performance. That I preferred the solitude of writing compared to the team work of acting. It's not so much about the writing for me but the telling of a story.
 

zoey

Acolyte
For me it was the reading. I read such wonderful stuff, that I had this great yearning to tell stories. And so I began.
 

Jordan

Dreamer
I started writing as a teenager because I was inspired by stories that I read; the worlds in those books not only sparked my imagination, they also started my love for words. I wanted to build whole worlds to escape into using words; I wanted make the worlds that I dreamed up permanent on the page and share them with other people. Unfortunately, I let my own insecurity and inner critic stop me from writing for a long time.
I've come back to writing after a chronic illness has caused me to become disabled and unable to work a typical job. I spent a number of months no knowing how to occupy my time or feel useful, and then an old idea was visited upon me. Soon I couldn't stop thinking about it and it became an obsession. Now writing gives me purpose. My world became very small when I stopped being able to leave my home, but going back to my first love, writing, let me reopen my world back up, bigger than it ever was before.
Writing is saving my sanity and giving me purpose.
(I'm loving reading everyone's responses by the way! Thank you for sharing all of your personal stories!)
 

ShadeZ

Maester
I was reading something that was very slow and didn't hold my attention and remember thinking I could write a better story. Eventually I noticed I enjoyed it, it was a nice escape from the real world. That and I became very attatched to my characters.
 
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