I began reading at age 3. A sickly kid, I read all the time. I do not know exactly when I first wrote. I do not remember a time when I didn't write.
The earliest stuff I read was sf, I still have the first book I ever bought, The Galaxy Collection of SF. I started writing around 4th grade or so, sf sketches and parodies.
The first books I read were the famous five series by Enid Blyton. I began to write in my teens I filled reporters notebooks with stories about the places we travelled to but they never had any conflict in them so the stories didn't go anywhere. I didn't show my work to anybody for years and I only started to write again when we moved to the US. A friend who read my work encouraged me to sign up for a writers workshop and I joined a writing group and gained valuable feedback from them.
children poems
my father taught me spelling, before I went to elementary school, so I began to write poems
my family of course
I first started reading "serious" works of fiction when I was in the 2nd grade. The first novel that I read was Jurassic Park, by the late Michael Crichton. Since then, I've always had in interest in writing and literature, specifically pertaining to fiction. Like many others, the first people to read and sample my works were teachers. Throughout my elementary and high school years, I can recall many times where my work was praised by educators. Naturally, English and language arts classes were among my highest-scoring classes. They were generally the most enjoyable as well.
I first read when I was five or six years old. In fact, my first library book centered around the ways that caterpillars turn into moths and butterflies.
I began write stories when I was around seven years old. Mostly, I remember those as being creative writing assignments in school. My mother remembers my assembling my stories and drawings into books, as well.
The first readers were my grade school teachers, my mother and possibly my grandmother.
I can't remember what I first read, and when. I was very young. My parents always read to me when I was little. And I don't mean little nursery rhymes. My parents read me large chapter books with lots of vocabulary, and told me to ask them to explain any words I didn't understand. I don't remember when I started writing, either. I guess once I started school. I never showed anyone what I wrote, unless it was an assignment. I was - and still am - pretty shy about my art.
Before I ever wrote anything down as a young boy I would act out stories, entire freakin' sagas of my own devising. The first ones I still remember were an action filled romp about dinosaurs attacking modern day Ohio(5 years or so before Jurassic Park) and a sequel to Robocop in which he fought a robotic dinosaur. I would sometimes even get other kids in the neighborhood to go along with it. There we would be, a bunch of 7 year olds with makeshift cardboard swords and toy guns attacking trees and pretending that the parking lot security guard of our apartment complex was an ogre. This continued well into my early twenties. After the parking lot security guard finally got a restraining order on me someone thought it wise to get me a computer. I haven't looked back since.
The first book I remember reading that really opened my mind to magic of writing and reading was Thomas Hardy's Return of the Native and Ayn Rand's Fountainhead. I was twelve and discovered books with meat--not just fluffy stories about ponies or babysitting clubs.
I began writing by accident. I was just accepted into a masters' program with an emphasis on American Literature (a thesis on Kate Chopin's The Awakening all planned out) when I took an elective creative writing class. And then, Bam! I was alive. Before that class, I felt like I had been walking around for all the years of my schooling in the dark, groping my way through my classes, trying desperately to find something that turned me on and inspired me to BE more and better. I had found something I loved and that loved me back.
I would happily spend hours and hours in front of my computer screen, letting my young son watch endless hours of PBS shows just so I could find out where the thoughts I began writing would take me. The greatest surprise of all was that I was good. Having spent most of my life hidden away reading almost anything I could get my hands on, I knew good and bad writing and though I was slow (am still slow) to believe it, I erred on the readable side.
I first wrote personal essay. I spent a winter and summer writing my grandmother's life story through my memories and my imagination. I spent a summer, heavy with my second child, lazy with the sweltering heat wave hitting Washington DC, reading personal essay after essay, eating up the language, the styles, the techniques and tricks and trying to both imitate and initiate my own style. Words poured out of me as my young son drove his cars over my feet, my pregnant belly, and even up and down my arms as I was typing away at the lap top key board. I woke with a mind full of images and ideas and fell into bed at night, fingers aching from typing, working out the details of tomorrows chapters. My husband, an intern at an international law firm, was lucky to get a few words from me through those months.
Then my second child came and a new creative writing class with the author Dean Hughes with an emphasis on YA fiction. I dreaded this class with sweaty palm and thumping heart. I had tried fiction over and over again and failed miserably. The first thing we were required to write was a first person narrative beginning chapter of a book. My stomach ached and my head spun and I knew that I'd fail the class because I had nothing. No ideas and I didn't even like first person books--at least most of them--the narrator was so unreliable and so often whinny. The days passed and still I came up with nothing. The gushing geyser of words from the summer had sudden and completely dried up. I had nothing. The night before the assignment was due I forced myself to sit down and just write anything. I sat in front of the computer and stared at the blinking curser. Young Adult . . . I was one of them once. I remember that time. I remember when . . . and so I began to write. And another light turned on. A bright, clear, defining light and I knew that something inside of me had changed and I was finding something important--my passion.
That writing assignment was the first chapter of my master's thesis and the beginning of my passion with writing and reading YA literature.
Dean Hughes read the hastily written, unedited pages I had whipped out the night before and wrote a page in response--where I could improve and that he loved everything about it. I read the response with hands shaking so hard I could barely read the writing on the pages. It was the first time I began to hope that what I thought was good was actually good to others as well. Chris Crowe carried on what Dean Hughes began and I eventually finished my first book, Believe.
In my final semester of graduate school, Shannon Hale came to talk to our class. She had just published Goose Girl and told us of the years she spent trying to get it published. I think she said it was rejected 68 times before someone wrote her back, rejecting the book, but suggesting that she publish it as a children's book. She tried and it was accepted by the first place she submitted it to. I am just beginning my process of actively pursuing publication with my second novel and know that there is a long road ahead of me. I dread it, but I also, finally, believe that what I've written is worth reading and can, hopefully, in some way, give something to those that read it.   | | |
Although I've enjoyed writing my entire life, and my job involves a lot of writing, I've come late to the creative aspect of this wonderful activity. I got the idea for my first novel in the early 1990s and eventually wrote the book five or so years later. Then, shortly after George W. Bush was "elected" president and began dismantling the country, I got an idea for a political novel that eventually became "Operation Capitol Hill." I'm now working on a non-fiction book that had its origin in the ideas I researched while writing "OCH."
I was told that I first picked up and began reading a Reader's Digest at the age of three. My Mother was understandably astonished at this feat because not many three year olds were able to just one day pick up something that advanced and began spouting out what was written on its pages. The more I think about it the more I realize it is actually quite remarkable, almost to the point of being miraculous.
I began to passionately write in school because I needed an outlet for all the things going on inside of me emotionally, spiritually, and mentally. It just grew and blossomed from there into where I am with it today.
My friends and family were the first to read what I wrote when I started, they were whose opinions I truly valued but now that I am older, I need more and I think I can get that from the general public. I focused mainly on poetry early in my childhood because I was drawn to it for some reason I cannot explain. People would read it and tell me how good it was and how much talent I had at it. I guess compliments drove me to pursue it further and further, now I hunger for criticism almost to an abusive point. I am driven to perfection and that has caused me to struggle in everyday life but I try to stay grounded and smile as much as I can each day. | | |
'I See The Sky' by Ann Peters, Enid Blyton's books. Made up my own picture children's books, my mum and dad and teachers read my first creative writing.
I read all types of stories poems and novels in locale languages.
I write some articles asper my intrest
I first read Moby-Dick a classic novel published in 1851 by American author Herman Melville. I begin to write just being bored out of my wits and I just wanted to say something without necessarily being verbal. The first people to read my work was my teachers and sister.
as far as i could remember, I started reading when I began schooling. I began to write through being inspired by the books I've read and started making my own stories to tell. The first persons who read my works are my friends in my elementary school days. |
99688 interviews created
INVITE YOUR FRIENDS