Why did you start writing?

I don't really know why I started. I wrote my first story when I was six years old and have been writing on and off ever since. I don't know that I have any deeper motivation other than that I just inherently enjoy telling stories.

 

Somebody stuck a crayon in my hand and taught me letters in school... it's been downhill since.

 

I started writing because I enjoy reading. The first thing I "wrote" was draft outline of researchers stuck in Crecateous back in... 2000 I think? Which was based on a dream I had, in which human survivors stuck in Pula amphitheatre had to negotiate with a leader of intelligent, talkative dinosaurs after unknown cataclysm (Virus? Asteroid? Dream didn't go into such a detail) had wiped out something like 99,99% of humanity. After that I started worldbuilding a couple of settings based on Lord of the Rings, tried drawing a Resident Evil comic which didn't go anywhere, kept worldbuilding medieval and eventually also sci-fi settings, and now I'm back to fantasy again. But as for actually writing, I mostly wrote non-fiction things in that whole period.

 

I was an artist before I was a writer, not that I didn't always have stories (or at least scenarios and world-building) in my head. As a kid, I tended to recruit my friends to act these out rather than writing them down. And then I got into an on-and-off career in nonfiction, mostly articles for fitness magazines (which taught me a great deal about writing). It took a while for me to finally sit down and write out my first novel!

 

I write because it gets the story out of my head. Once its set down in black and white, I don't have the urge to tinker and adjust a story and I can move on to new ones. Okay, the urge is less.

 

Nobody writes the books I want to read.

 

Pretty much this. I was writing plot points in the margins of my textbooks in grade school and using them to tell stories to my friends after school.

I wrote my first novel because I couldn't find a book like the one I wanted to read. I more or less became an author because I wanted to write the kinds of books that I figured someone should write.

(Edit: 30 years later, I'm still the only one writing them . . .)

 

I also recall writing stories for school with lots of red marks for spelling where i took flyers on “big” words, think that was 3rd grade. By 5th or 6th grade I stepped off the school bus with a friend and declared I was going to be a writer. Back in those days, fantasy I enjoyed was a barren landscape. Now the landscape is cluttered, but there still isn’t that much I enjoy, LOL.

 

The important thing is, if there is fantasy that we really want to read, there are lots of other people out there who really would love to read it as well. And when there seems to be little or none of it on the market, that just means there's no real competition.

 

I’m kind of an unpleasant fellow. My deepest, most serene feelings are those I have for my own, fictive characters. So naturally, I have to go down that path.

I started writing because … I really needed a break from the ever-so-serious novel I was working on. I had this tongue-in-cheek scenario where the typical hero was tied up by some rogue, and they both seem to be pretty much aware of the sadomasochistic overtones. My muse was a frame from a comic by Alan Moore where this funny-animal damsel in distress plays along with her victim status. So I was just aiming for silly fun, with lotsa banter back and forth between the two characters. Then the story gradually began to grow. Stupidly, it ended up very much inspired by the one I needed a break from. I even stole an entire scene from myself.

 

I resemble this, except I never did the submission thing because I had a psychological disorder that once I knew the ending of a book I lost interest in writing it, and started writing other stories... as well as world building/backstory disease which kept my stories backward in time in a single world. Three things happened:

1: UCLA screenwriting taught me to finish stories
2: I found the beginning to world’s story I needed
3: I found the voice I wanted and finally believed my writing was as good as other people had been telling me for years

The real irony of how my brain has changed over the years is how knowing the ending ruined my motivation in the past, and now it’s what I live more. UCLA/screenwriting probably deserves credit for this awakening, along with maturation of the old noodle, heh heh.

 

Honestly? I started because I was on a forum many years ago and someone shared some of their fanfic and it inspired me to write my own work. I found an online writing workshop and started learning, but I quit after a while, and didn't come back to it until about 5 years ago.

writing was fun that I expected to have published. I don't know if that makes sense.

 

The beauty of screenwriting was you had 120 pages to write a bare bones story that's mostly dialogue, and finishing is kind of forced on you by the 100-120 page standard. One could NOT finish, but it wasn't like writing an epic, where you can just wander about forever, LOL.

 

Because I loved reading and wanted to share my ideas to the world and perhaps also add something to the world while I lived. Although as limitations and restrictions are being felt I feel this may be the reason as to why I give up on writing.

 

My reasons are definately as part of the escapism route. Having found myself in a situation I had no control over and constantly being hounded by bullies, I found that writing, drawing and video games provided me with relief from the stress and also the ability to control events. I found that I was actually quite good at writing, owing to a rather vivid imagination and a deep passion I constalty try to get across on the paper.