General Discussion : Why did you start writing?

When I was in 7th grade, we had to write a short story for an English assignment.  Everybody responded really well to mine and I was like "Hey, that was fun, maybe I should do that more." (In high school, everybody responded really well to my writing, too - I used to have people call or IM me over the summer when they got bored and started flipping through the school's literary magazine - so it took some getting used to when I got to college and - gasp! - there were people in the world that didn't like my work haha.  Actually, that did take some getting used to.) 

I don't have any of the little stories I wrote when I was in middle school, but I do remember how a few of them went, still, and my parents' reactions to them.  Looking back, it probably says a lot about the type of kid I was.  They weren't particularly happy stories.  When explaining one of them to my father, I remember him wincing as I got halfway though the plot because it was such a downer.  He just went "I can't take hearing this anymore.  I'm sure it's a great story, but does anything good actually happen to this guy?"  With the type of person my dad is, I don't think he was trying to be discouraging (he's always been very supportive), but I also don't think he realized how encouraging of a comment that was.  Seeing that emotional response just from the synopsis was amazing.  Since then, I've learned not to just aimlessly pile struggle after struggle onto a character (at least, not just for the sake of it), and to use tragedy with more purpose, but man do I love getting dark on a reader.

Your going to laugh (and this is why I never say don't write fanfiction even though I hate writing it not), I started writing because I wanted to fix a really bad movie I once watched. The characters had no clear motivations for their actions, and had no backstory to speak of. I didn't like it, so I chucked that one out of the window.

These days I prefer self-motivated stories, or short fiction that I write purely to fix earlier stories I write. Or perhaps to find a new way to plot stories.

Because Bob writes, and someone else must balance out the universe. heh

When I was a kid, an English teacher told me he really liked my voice, that I was able to write exactly like I spoke and that was a rarity (baffling, as it seemed the easiest method to me). My high-school French teacher knew I was a musician, and gave me a journal for graduation, telling me to jot down song lyrics in it, which I did throughout college. In studying broadcasting and video production, I wrote a lot of scripts, and continued doing so at my first job, along with a ton of ad copy. Between that and poetry, I'd gotten good at concise language, combined with a screenwriter's visual palette, but I grew tired of their limitations and wanted to describe shit in greater detail. Then I read Palahniuk around the turn of the century, and he gateway-drugged me onto other authors. After seeing how much garbage lined bookstore shelves, I said, "I can do better than that."

I started out writing "novels" about thoroughbred racehorses with my childhood best friend. We had stacks and stacks of scribbled on looseleaf that we'd exchange constantly just as a way to keep us immersed in our horsey fantasies while we waited for new books by our favorite equine-centric authors to come out. After we grew out of that phase, I kept writing for a little while but pretty much only for school projects. I was almost always the first one picked when it came to writing oriented group assignments. Around eighth or ninth grade though I stopped entirely. I rarely even completed class assignments, flunking the journalism course I was invited to join because I refused to do anything other than copy edit for the paper and almost flunking high school entirely because I didn't want to finish my Brit Lit thesis paper on absurdism in Heart of Darkness. I think the only thing that really got me started again was my dislike for Janet Evanovich. I guess that's why I write now; to stick it to Evanovich in my own weird, quiet way.

My imagination is always running on full speed, and I needed an outlet. I'm constantly throwing together different ideas, strange situations, etc. At work, my job is pretty monotonous so I catch myself creating characters and scenes and situations out of the most mundane things.

Writing gives me the opportunity to get these random things out of my mind, so I can make room for the next string of randomness.

@ Gordon

I, too, have said "I can do better than that."

And I already do, for @#$%'s sake. But I'm not writing Star Wars books, so I have to work harder, I guess?

Because I couldn't afford art school. I wanted to be a comic book or animation artists, but art school was 25K a year, and I couldn't handle that being a poor kid from rural Iowa. I took a video production class and found that I could use my aeshetic sense in that medium. I decided to go Journalism school for electronic media production. From there, I started writing screenplays and then took other writing classes. I decided I didn't enjoy writing news and switched to being an English major. I am a better writer than I ever was a visual artist, although part of me misses that aspect of my creative life. Really, all those comic books I drew and characters I created were just me telling stories. In hindsight, I always had a talent for writing and probably should have pursued it earlier. On the other hand, I think my time in visual arts, music, journalism, and theater have had a great influence upon how I write.

Oh, and I do it now because if I don't I start getting antsy. I have to find an outlet for creativity and writing is the path I chose. I spent the last three years in grad school doing nothing but reading and writing. Now that it is over, I don't know what else to do. :p

No, what it actually came down to was Toy Story. I mostly wanted to be a traditional animator. You sort of need to go to art school to learn that specific skill. When Toy Story came out, it became pretty evident that animation was going to change. I sort of saw the writing on the wall. I was mostly right about that too. Feature-length hand-drawn animation is basically a dinosaur. I still draw occasionally, but it is more for my son than anyone else. Something similar happened with screenwriting. When it became evident that it would be difficult to be a professional screenwriter in the midwest (I was about to get married), I focused more on prose.

I am a pretty scattered person, creatively. I majored in so many things that I ended up with a degree in liberal studies. My master's degree in literature is interdisciplinary. I love to learn about everything. There isn't really enough time in the day to do all of the artistic things I would like to do. I want to draw, research literature (academic writing is very creative), write, act, play music, and sing...but between work and single parenthood, I don't have much time and have to make choices. For the most part, I choose writing, athough my drums are set up right next to my writing desk. I think it does benefit my fiction writing to have so many interests. It gives me a lot of general knowledge and experience to draw upon.

But don't all men naturally come equipped with something to "beat on"?

Or maybe it does relate to getting work done. After all, men outnumber women 3 to 1 in the industry and girls aren't quite as conveniently... structured. I think scientific studies should be done on the subject.

I'm not sure.  It could be because I like coming up with stories, or maybe it's just I have a hard time talking with people in general.  It kind of stinks.  I feel the only way I can express myself is through an email.  I also love movies, but you are so limited with what they can do unless it is or has animation in it.  Words are endlless possibilities.

I'm glad to see I'm the not the only one that does both. Actually I started out as an illustrator. I still draw, but I've been doing writing for so so long now, it's hard to really start sketching consistently.

I started writing because I got tired of drawing and felt horribly as a musician. 
And since I have always loved good stories and books in general I'm now in the middle of failing as a writer :D

Because I hate trees.

For me there was a macro and a micro reason.  The macro was I thought I'd forgot some wonderful stories, so I wanted to write them down before I forgot.  The micro was walking through a romance section, and thinking that I never read these.  I try to step outside my comfort zone so I flipped through a few to find that one that was, if not something I liked, at least readable so I could see more of what the people who like it like it for.  20 minutes and a few dozen paragraphs in a few dozen books had me thinking "I can do better than this." So I started writing a series of romance books.

Well, copyright is tough.