My first recollection of "enjoyment reading", would have to be comic books. I was fanatical for many years, mostly Marvel, but who could resist a good Batman or Superman story line. As far as my writing goes my first reader was my wife. She's a great editor.
I started reading at a very young age. My earliest memories of reading are of the classics and fairytales, such as Little Women, Heidi, Black Beauty, Cinderella, the Seven Sisters, Sleeping Beauty, and Hansel and Gretal. I loved the love stories and the spooky stories the most. One of my fondest reading memories was of a large collection of children's rhymes and poems. My favorite poem/rhyme was:
One misty, moisty morning,
When cloudy was the weather,
I chanced to meet an old man clothed all in leather.
He began to compliment, and I began to grin,
How do you do, and how do you do?
And how do you do again?
Mysterious and sort of leacherous, is it not?
In grade school I moved on to mystery-solving books. Everyone else just loved Nancy Drew but I preferred Trixie Belden and the Box Car Children. I also read the Little House on the Prarie series. By middle school I was deeply enthralled by horror and more of the classics, such as Animal Farm and The Scarlet Letter. I started reading Anne Rice and Stephen King at around 10 - 11 years old and fell in love with Shakespeare and JRR Tolkien in High school. I have to admit I was also quite deeply into Harlequin and other romance novels in High School, especially the historical romances.
As for writing, I cannot remember not writing! I was making up little stories before I ever started kindergarten, both verbally, with drawing, and writing. I know I was already writing poetry/rhymes very early on. I have been published since I was 7 years old, when one of my poems won a city-wide poetry contest for children and was published in my local city newspaper. I believe my love of writing stemmed naturally from my love of reading and music.
I would have to say my family and teachers read my earliest writings, then later on my friends and those who read my columns in the newspapers I worked for. I was writing a column on school life for a state-wide (Michigan) paper at the age of 16, then worked as a campus life columnist at Grand Valley State University at 17.   | | |
Although I had children's books like Dr. Seuss, I never read what would be considered classic children's fiction until much later. As an adult, I still count "Alice In Wonderland" and "Charlie & The Chocolate Factory" as some of my favorite books. I started reading more adult fiction at a young age. The house was literally littered with Stephen King books. I read "Night Shift" when I was in the sixth grade and I was fascinated by how well the stories were told and how worked up I could get while reading them.
I never did any serious writing until I was a senior in High School and took a creative writing course. I think my imagination was fueled by those scary stories I read a s a child and I think I was tackling subjects other than late teen angst, which is what was being written by most of the students at the time. The first person to tale real interest in what I was writing was the editor of the school's literary magazine. He let it be known that he would publish anything I wrote. Even though it was my first year of writing, I had four or five stories published in the magazine that year. | | |
I've been reading since, well, I was able to read. I read everything. I can't really nail it down, because I read so much when I was growing up. I wrote my first short stories when I was six, for a class project. They were printed and glued into a "book." I said then, in my "About the Author," that I wanted to be a writer. My mum, my grade one teacher, and my classmates were the first to read my stories. They were lucky. Those stories were pretty fantastic.
I was an orphan up until I was 8 years old, when I was adopted by a wonderful family who provided me with lots to read. Among them, I enjoyed the many Nancy Drew tales.
I did not begin to write until I took a Print Journalism course at St. Clair College in Windsor, Ontario, Canada when I was 33. I found that I had a knack for interviewing as well as creating stories from what I was told. The first to read my writing were my journalism teachers. I passed the three-year course with the Dean's Award for top of my class.
My first books were the Oz series of the Wizard of OZ fame, when I was about eight or nine and laid up for two weeks with an illness. My Freshman English instructor at Brown encouraged me to write, being taken with several essays I wrote on my summer work at a large ice cream factory, and also those about the big railroad circuses which set up near my home. Later in my first real job at a magazine I wrote my first novel and had no difficulty finding a reputable agent who also encouraged me. But a major career change put an end to this for a long while.
I first read allot of advanture books for young adults. Now I am more in to fantasy and a bit thrillers. I am a big fan of terry brooks, R.E. Feist and Niccy French. I began to write when I was old enough to write down woords. I started out making poets for my mother.
As a youngster I read children's adventure stories such as Biggles, Famous Five. Later I enjoyed similar stories by popular authors of the time. So called 'classics' bored me.
I began writing language units for children in the classes I taught. (10 to 12 year olds). This lead onto a full length science fiction unit.
Who first read my novels? Middle of the road adults who wanted more than just escapism and enjoyed good characterisation
i start with cousings reading for me when i was kids and I find out about my inspirations with 13 yaers old and i start wrote small poems
I am an engineer so up to the 1960s I had read mostly technical books however I discovered the series of books on sociology by Robert Ardrey and devoured them as I was having trouble with the local Australian tall poppy syndrome that punishes technical innovators and keeps Australia a local technology free country. Robert's series of books led me to not initially begin a book but to begin to draw out what became the Big Picture of Culture in which two basic theme personalities, the culturally manipulative woman stood behind the unmanipulative but technically competent male and by balancing her sexual attraction of the male with her cultural manipulation of the male to engage an activity and so produce wealth for her and her children, the very basic picture of culture. The picture grew over time to include project officer women, the technically competent, less manipulative women and the manipulative male personality, the male who engages an activity politically, this picture led to my book being published in the US in 2007 and includes a much expanded Big Picture of Culture. | | |
I started reading for pleasure at an early age, but I don't remember a specific title of that first book.
My parents wrote letters to family and friends all the time so I probably started writing by doing the same. Dad was military so we moved alot, and there were always people left behind with whom I would communicate but only for a brief time before giving up on the former friends. They never wrote back. The family did though so that helped.
a) Enid Blyton - the Five Friends series
b) Personal travel diaries; notes about places; early journalism
c) Others met while travelling
- first exposure/interest in reading: areas in business, self-help, investment, psychology, metaphysics when I was 17.
- began writing through journaling and friends' input of suggestions.
- my close friends, internet/ website subscribers, local school students
The first book I remember reading all by myself was the Cat in the Hat and to this day I love crazy verse.
The idea for becoming a writer hit me when I was almost four years old. It was my older sister's idea. She was five and she decided we were going to write a series of books about a girl called Suzie and her dog called, Scamp. We were sure they would be exciting and adventurous and came up with a list of titles - Suzie and Scamp at School, Suzie and Scamp on Holidays, Suzie and Scamp at Home but we came across one problem - neither of us had learned to write at this time.
My class mates and teachers seemed to be enthralled with my adventurous stories because I was the one asked to read out my compositions, as they were called in those far off days when I was one of about 60 - 70 children in a three teacher Primary School.
I began writing out of anger, depression, frustration and an increasing sense of conscience over my past developing weapons systems. I was in the middle of a court battle (I was the plaintiff) and the defendants were playing games, primarily a game of attrition. Unfortunately in Canada (Kanadakastan), justice only favors those who can afford to pay and it protects the criminals, especially government ministers, university management and their "friends." But there was more to it than just the court case. I was trying to figure out why this situation which created the court battle had occurred in the first place and I settled on my past with the South African military as being the primary reason, maybe a kind of bad karma revisiting me in the present. So I came clean, I wrote about the killings, the deaths, government and corruption, and of course the Helderberg in 1987. The first people to read the book were friends, now ex-friends as they considered both my abilities and my past far too dangerous. My family of course read the book, some cried but I haven't been disowned yet. | | |
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