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.   | | |
The first book I read was called The Magic Bus. It was a present from relatives in New York. I was about seven years old at the time. I loved that book..... I think I was born to write and scribbled and doodled on everything and anything since I was a toddler. I think I did more doodling on my schoolbooks than studying. My parents and teachers were the first to review my creative works and more times than I can tell my efforts were not appreciated!
I started reading at age 3. At age 10 I started writing poems. My family and my teachers were the first to reand it.
true stories, biography, history, etc. My family were the first to read my short stories.
When I was four I started with comic books. Then I moved on to children's adventure stories.
We used to write on rainy or snowy days, when we couldn't go outside. They weren't even really stories, our parents just gave us some paper and pencils to keep us quiet.
My family I guess.
I learned to read and write before ever entering kindergarten. I was writing very short children's stories at the age of 4. As an only child and subject to solitary pursuits, I was a voracious reader all the way through school. During the summers, I would spend most of my time at the local library or sitting in a tree, reading by myself.
I suppose my mother (also a freelance writer and poet) was the first person to read what I wrote and, then, later, my teachers -- many of whom encouraged me both as a writer and in my other studies at school.
I really do not remember my first book...however I read a lot of Enid Blyton. I always loved writing poetry and the first of my poems that was read was at my grandfather Joe's wake. I wrote a poem about him...and I allowed my family to read it. I was 12 years old. Death and the passing of mankind has always had an impact on me and I think that for a young person writing was the best way to release the emotions.
I joined a new magazine in early 2005, which gave me the chance to start publishing articles. I also started working on my first book, Men Are Like Mocha Lattes, which was published in 2007. This year, 2008, I became a freelance writer for the Toronto Star newspaper, and I'm just wrapping up my second screenplay. As an editor/contributing writer for the Canadian charity OnexOne, I've had the chance to edit Matt Damon's work... but still haven't met him! (maybe next year...)
I would love to say “Shakespeare’s” works or Miltons “Paradise Lost “ or all the Old Classics were the first things that I read and that forever shaped me. But is was what is now called Graphic Novels that touched a well deep within me that has till this day remained full. I was addicted to comics by the age of nine-Superman, Flash Green lantern, Doctor Strange and the rest of the DC gang fueled my imagination and made reading fun rather than a chore. If not for them I would have never had the inclination or desire to discover and be enriched by the likes of Shakespeare, Milton, Homer and all the old masters of the Literary world.
I began to write out of necessity. I needed remedial English and basic writing courses while in college just to write a functional sentence. I was an abysmal writer and my professor’s said I had an agile mind but would go nowhere in the academic world or would barely get by in the business world with the bad writing skills that I had. I was a gifted oral speaker but a lazy and undisciplined writer and I had to sweat blood in order to learn the basic fundamentals in order to write coherently. I did learn how to write philosophical papers well enough to get by but writing did not come natural –it was quite painful. It was through writing poetry –mainly foolish love poems – that made me hone my skills and made me a more disciplined writer. Thirty years later I’m still learning how to write.
The first to read my mad scribbles were my Professors. Thank God they saw a dribble of promise and encouraged me to write like an educated young adult rather than a first grader. | | |
I hated to read when I was in school. In college I was introduced to a speed reading course which I was required to take for a certain course. I gotta tell you, it opened a world of knowledge to me! It gave me the gift of comprehension and a deep desire to learn and read more and more about the world, history and people throughout history. I then started reading everything I could about the War between the states. I am not as interested in the battles as I am the involved characters of the time. I find that there are so many lives inner-twined.
I hated English in High scholl and college because it was too complicated to learn structure and diagraming, needless trival, if you ask me! Perhaps that is what turns so many young people off and they don't ever find enjoyment from books.
I started to write because I had so many things I wanted to say and I couldn't hold it in any more. I still am not a great speller, thank God for spell check, huh?
You can see all of my pride in my interviews and my commentary on my website: www.GlobalCopywritingService.com. I am currently working on a book about Marvin Popcorn Sutton, an appalachian mountainman who is known for his quaility moonshine and getting ready to go to jail. | | |
The first books I read were in the Dutch language when I was a young innocent hindustani boy in Surinam (Paramaribo, main city). I remember the funny stories of ‘Pietje Bell’ and ‘Pinkeltje’. The famous book with title “Alleen op de wereld’ (Alone on the world), written by Hector Malot made a deep impression on my mind and I think this was the first voluptuous book I read completely without any illustrations.
Later on at the high school. as a teenager in Surinam, I had to read ‘Jude the obscure’ of author Thomas Hardy as a punishment from my English teacher for being to naughty during the lessons. I would be excluded from the exams if I did not made a good summary of this huge book in English. And I read it with the help of an English to Dutch dictionairy and completed the handwritten summary on time. This was the first English book I read and now I must admit that it was a good punishment for me during my wildly youth.
How did you begin to write?
When I was studying on the University of Technology in Delft city for mechanical Engineering I discovered that writing was my passion. Later on I discovered that mass communication gave me a kick, and it gave me a feeling of being high and stoned.
During the period 1990 till 1995 I was semi-illegal in the Netherlands and was very lonely, depressed, suicidally and casteless. My own family chased me away, because I was a failed hindu man. Hindu girls did not wanted to marry me, which broke me down deep inside my heart and disrupted all my love feelings. In the Hindu culture people expect you to commit suicide, when you are a failed man, without future. So I was in serious problems during that time period. Then I decided to start writing. My first handwritten book was in Dutch, with title ‘Holland, paradise or hell?’. I also started writing about my theoretical research about the complex and dynamic multicultural society, because it fascinated me a lot. Later on after 1993 I bought my first personal computer (a 486 with 8 megabyte Ram and a harddisk of only 40 Mb, with the prehistorical DOS 5 and Windows 4.1 operating system) and started some writing and research projects.
Who were the first to read what you wrote?
I remember that I published an article about Vedic Mathematics during the year 1989 in a small Hindu magazine and that my first readers were the Hindustanis in the Netherlands. Later on I published in papers of foreign and Hindu people in the Netherlands, all in Dutch, during the years 1999 till 2001. In the year 2001 my first English texts with titles “Boycott It Europe” and “The Mahatma and his criminal son” were published on some big Indian and Hindu sites and I got tens of thousands of readers. Till our present time these articles are online and I was surprised when an Indian man in the Netherlands told me last month that he saw my article in India. I felt very good and was proud of myself.
Since january 2004 my own website went online and it has become one of the biggest sites of an independent (hindu)writer in the small Dutch language region (only 22 million native readers), with almost 1.3 million words in profound and excellent Dutch written by me. It is clear that roughly 500 000 Dutch speaking people must have read something from me on the web till the present day. | | |
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