When did you know you wanted to become a writer? Was it a childhood dream? Something you arrived at kicking and screaming? Was there a particular trigger when you thought to yourself, “You know, what I really want to be doing is staring at a computer screen on my nights and weekends, inventing worlds and stuff”?
I came to the writing game pretty late. I had taken some short story classes in college, wrote a screenplay in my early 20’s, but never really thought I’d write a novel. I was 25 before I started writing in earnest, on a novel that didn’t work out, and I was 27 when I started JACOB WONDERBAR.
What about you? When did you know you wanted to write?
Art: “Woman Writing a Letter” by Frans van Mieris
Becca says
I realized I wanted to be a writer when I decided I wanted to live in a box and scratch my delusional dreams into cardboard until I die.
Not really.
I don't know when. I've always loved writing, but I think it was somewhere in the 10th grade when I came up with two characters and a story I couldn't get out of my head.
I never wrote it, but it set me on the path.
WriteOnWendy says
I wanted to be a writer since I learned how to make letters. My desire only grew when I discovered that being a writer also meant I could be a thinker. My biggest challenge has been realizing that it was actually something I could do instead of just dream about.
rickjsand says
In third grade I was in a 'gifted' writing program where I wrote a mystery about a coin collection. I kept writing over the years, but it wasn't until I read "Peter Pan" as an adult that I knew I wanted to write stories for younger audiences.
Kevin Lynn helmick says
Ahh-I've told this story many times in many versions.
I grew up with four older brothers (I'm the youngest) and the house was full Hardy Boys mystery's as well as the trendy paperbacks of the sixty's and seventy's. I was seven years younger than my closest brother, and I remember pulling out the drawers of their dresser to create a ladder so that I could get to the record player and the collection of 45's they so brilliantly put out of my reach. My favorite was The Beatles, Paperback Writer (go figure.) Without knowing at the time (probably four or five years old) that the lyrics; a desperate plea to a publisher from an aspiring writer was almost taken word for word from a query of some kid Paul knew.
But the chorus, that's what hooked me. They made it sound like a super hero theme song and it entranced me. Being a paperback writer sounded cool and I read everything I could get my hands on, and wrote, (tried to anyway.) And always wanted to write a "great american novel."
I've worked a lot of jobs over the years. I've put my writing aside for years at a time, but it's like that little voice that keeps returning, wispering,'it's who you are Kev forget everything else, this matters." I've been the most happy when writing, wether at 14 or 47, deep in the heat of composition is where I feel at home, and the most job satisfaction I've ever known.
So I don't think there was definite moment that I wanted to be a writer. I think I always thought I already was.
I still think I am.
Suzanne says
Okay, so would you believe me if I said that although I was writing a column for the Philadelphia Inquirer decades ago, it's only now — with the imminent publication of my first book, BARE NAKED AT THE REALITY DANCE — that I "knew I wanted to be a writer." It may have something to do with the fact that only when I wrote the book did I finally find the voice that is outrageously mine.
Suzanne says
Okay, so would you believe me if I said that although I was writing a column for the Philadelphia Inquirer decades ago, it's only now — with the imminent publication of my first book, BARE NAKED AT THE REALITY DANCE — that I "knew I wanted to be a writer." It may have something to do with the fact that only when I wrote the book did I finally find the voice that is outrageously mine.
Anonymous says
In 4th grade I made plans to write the great American novel and live in semi-seclusion up in the mountains somewhere, far from my well-meaning but clingy fans.
Then in 7th grade I got back an essay from my English teacher who mostly taught high school (and was a tough grader). He had written "No corrections necessary," which was high praise in his book.
But I didn't write until I lost my teaching job. I figured I'd taught hundreds of elementary students how to write, so I must be able to write myself…
DD Falvo says
When I ran out of books I wanted to read. 🙂
Bane of Anubis says
Not sure… an even harder question for me… when do you know you're a good writer?
Ellen T McKnight says
I was five, wandering the block by myself, when I passed a strange adult on the sidewalk and sensed how for a second our minds touched, then withdrew. Something about aloneness and yet the possibility of connection struck me, and I thought how I'd like to write a story about that someday. That is when I first knew that I wanted to write.
Eli Brown says
Ummm…..52?
Actually I wrote a novel when I was in my 20's with pencil in a spiral notebook. Not sure where it is now. I put it away when I decided that I needed to stop trying to escape real life, get serious and start acting like an adult and I went to work for a bank!
Now I'm in my 50's and the ideas just won't stop.
Betty Houle says
i've been writing since high school (I'm almost 63 now) and only since a go-round with breast cancer have i been writing on a regular basis. I have a collection of poems written during the course of several biopsies, radiation and finally a double mastectomy and reconstruction that served as a journal of my mental and physical state as well as an escape from conscious thought about what was going on. Since then, I have begun writing children's stories as well as poetry, and two of my poems have been published.
Cathy Keaton says
Kind of late to the game, as well. I was 21, taking a creative writing course in college when I randomly realized that a book I had read 3 years earlier made me want to be a writer. For some odd reason, I STILL want to write (14 years later, lol).
Deniz Bevan says
From about the age of 5, when I wrote my first story. What computer screen? I still draft with paper and pen. On pub napkins, the backs of receipts, margins of work documents… Inspiration strikes anywhere and anywhen!
Charlotte Sannazzaro says
I had a huge writing output from the moment I learned how to write. As a child I mainly wrote fantastical stories, turning to poetry in my teans. After seeking a career to pay the bills, my ambition to one day become and author wouldn't leave me alone. I'm currently revising my second completed MS.
Lee Wardlaw says
Age seven: wrote first book.
Age eleven: wrote first two novels.
Age fourteen: had two poems published in my high school literary magazine.
Age fifty-five: still writing, still loving it! Thanks for asking. 🙂
Susanna says
I've always been a voracious reader, even as a child, and I loved the way you were pulled into a wholly different reality when reading a novel. I decided I wanted to be a writer when I was 12 and read Lord of the Rings and then the Dune trilogy. I wanted so badly to be able to create a whole new world that readers could inhabit. I thought I would study English in University but was waylaid by science, and then grad school and babies, but now I'm determined to actually follow through with my youthful ambition. kibbirredists
Carol Riggs says
High school! Had a great English teacher, so I wrote short stories and a half-dozen chapters on a novel. Learned how to send off stuff and start my rejection slip collection. ;o) Then I took a class in college. Didn't begin writing in earnest until I was 33, however.
alexia says
I've always been writing. I wrote my first story when I was about five, with the specific intent to manipulate my parents into getting me a pony. I started writing my first novel when I was eleven or so. But life intervened, and I didn't get really serious and ever actually finish one until I was 26 (a couple years ago).
Roslyn Rice says
Every since my mom gave me my first diary as a teenager. I instantly knew that being able to express myself through words was powerful.
Roslyn
https://doubleportioninspiration.blogspot.com/
wry wryter says
I know the exact minute, day and time.
Monday, November 25, 1963.
On the previous Friday President Kennedy was assassinated. For the first time in history the entire nation was literally riveted to our TV screens watching the tragedy play out. My mother and I cried the entire weekend. Late Sunday night I took out my loose-leaf and wrote about what I was feeling. When I look back I realize, as a nation, we had been raped of our innocence. It was an awful time, beyond heartbreaking.
I wrote about that weekend and then took my short one page essay to school to show my English teacher. Before first period English, at 8:30 am I showed it to the kid sitting next to me. He was a football player. He cried when he handed it back to me.
“It’s good he said, its real good.”
My English teacher, also the football coach, read it to the class. He had to stop half way through because he was crying. When he finished he told me I must ‘always’ write.
That minute, that day, I became a writer.
I am a lousy speller, my punctuation sucks, but I’ve had over sixty essays published. I’m sorry this post is so long but I haven’t thought about that time, in a long time. How sad it is that such terrible event opened my heart to the wonderful world of writing.
Well…now you all know how old I am.
Lucinda Bilya says
A long long long long time ago, in a far far far far away land.
It was about the seventh grade when I wrote my first poem and short story (very very short). Writing filled my imagination with wonder. However, the world was a dark dark dark dark place until I entered the Twilight Zone where I saw the dawn.
Years of daydreaming of adventures and places near Never-Never Land, I ran away. For half a century, I ran and ran and ran until there was no place else to run.
Sipping on a cup of coffee while staring out a window at the world waking up, I eased up to a computer and vanished into cyberland where there are no boundaries to my running.
Now, some of my adventures are recorded memories and others belong to the fiction characters I create.
Pretty much all of my life, the desire to write has possessed me, but until eight years ago, the tree failed to produce fruit.
Now it seems the tree is in all seasons at the same time.
Tracy Edward Wymer says
When I drew a person with arms coming out of the head, I knew illustrating was clearly not in my future.
Scarlet Passmore says
When I was about three or four years old, I started teaching myself to read (with a bit of help from mom and dad, but mostly myself). Since then, I was an avid reader, reading anything so long as it had words. Then came a fourth grade Halloween assignment. Everyone was to write a little short story, a page or so, about Halloween. There weren't any rules, so I wrote a story by hand and turned it in. The teacher read it, and during a parent-teacher conference, told my mother and I that she loved it and encouraged to me to write more, even write a book! I have been writing ever since, and hope to soon find an agent for my first completed and edited work. If I do get published, I hope to find that teacher again (she no longer works at that school) and ask for permission to dedicate my first book to her. Because if it wasn't for her, I might never have taken up the pen and started writing.
britney fitzgerald says
My moment was definitely a trigger moment…
Here was my "Bold Statement" to the world:
https://thewhy-britfit.blogspot.com/2011/03/blog-statement.html
Marion says
You call that late, Nathan? In your twenties? LOL! I'm just finding out in my fifties that the only thing I'm REALLY good at is writing.
My best friend senior year high school did go to study journalism, so I gave that some thought. But I thought I wouldn't be able to write to a deadline.
Many years ago, I made a disastrous attempt at a romance novel–never anywhere near finished.
But now, since over 10 years ago, I have something to write about. Actual historical people have started to fascinate me–real poor schmucks, just like the rest of us!
So now I have research to keep me off the streets, a blog to keep me journalism-ing, & all sorts of multiple personalities to live in to keep me certifiably crazy.
I guess that's cool. (Even more cool would be if it would turn into a paying gig.)
Ishta Mercurio says
Wow, Nathan. If you came to the writing game late at 25, then at 31, I didn't arrive until the chips had all been cashed and there was nothing left on the table but a couple of cigar butts smoking in a dirty ashtray.
The signs have been there my whole life: I devoured books as a kid, always asked hard questions, wrote stories, and reaped praise from all my teachers, from the time I was in elementary school. For a while I thought I wanted to be a journalist, but it seemed too dangerous to my 12-year-old mind. My family all thought I was going to be a writer. So did my extended family. It was what everybody said, from third grade onward. But I took another path toward storytelling, and majored in dance and theatre in college. I still want to work as an actor, but I also want to write. It took having kids of my own to make me realize that writing for kids was what I really felt I needed to do.
Marion says
Plus I read somewhere that Daniel Defoe wrote or published his first novel when he was in his 60s. Which at the time still seemed to me a somewhat remote age. So there's a precedent!
My secret comment code word is unalize. Sort of a portmanteau (Lewis Carroll style) word for analyze and anal-ize, I guess. Maybe self-analysis–the letter "u" at the beginning being shorthand for "you".
Carolyn Arnold says
When I was a teenager, I used to write short romance novels. I even contacted Harlequin to get their submission requirements.
But, as life when on, things became busier, and writing got left behind. It wasn't until about 4 yrs ago now (then 13 yrs later from the last time I wrote)that I rediscovered my passion for it, and completed my first full-length novel. Now, I've written 6, and am well into my 7th.
David R. Matteri says
I've been writing things as far back as I can remember. When I was real little, maybe four or five years old, I wrote a science fiction epic on my grandmother's old electric typewriter (in reality it was just a page and half of Wing Commander fan fiction).
It wasn't until High School when I realized that I wouldn't be happy unless I was writing. So I wrote every chance I got.
In my Junior year I wrote a short story for a contest held by the PTSA and was awarded with a plaque (Honorable Mention). I was in my music class when a lady came over and asked me to go to the cafeteria to receive the award. Everyone looked at me in surprise.
"What did you do?" Someone asked. "I wrote a short story."
The room got real quiet as if I had took out my intestines and wore them as a hat.
During the Halloween of my Senior year, I wrote a short creeper of a tale for a contest held by the local library. My story was one of the three winning entries. My prizes were a book of classic scary stories, a bag of candy, and a chance to hang out with other kids at a Halloween party. That night is one of the best memories I have of High School.
Karen Peterson says
Writing was never something I decided. It was just something I did. I was always the kid tucked away in a corner with a pencil and a notepad, writing stories while everyone else was having a different kind of fun.
Marie Ohanesian Nardin says
High School in the mid '70's. I had a great English teacher and when she placed the needle on Simon & Garfunkel's record "Sounds of Silence" (yes, I come from the era of those antique round black things that spin round and round)music became literature, and I was hooked. However, life and a really bad experience with a college Creative Writing Professor got in the way and it wasn't until I put my career aside, and my children off to college, that I gathered my life experiences and sat down to write my first novel "Beneath the Lion's Wings". It's now complete and in the querying stage.
J.C. Martin says
When I was 8 or 9, I wrote and drew a comic book series with cartoonised versions of our pet dogs as stars. When I was 14, I wrote a full-length novel, by hand, in a ruled notebook, HATED it, and gave it away to a friend. In the last few years I've been writing lots of short stories and fanfiction, but it's only been in the last year or so that I felt I really had a story I wanted to share…let's just hope the world is willing to accept it!
Elie says
I can't remember a time when I didn't want to be a writer.
But I didn't know I wanted to write for children until I had a child myself, though looking back, all the signposts were there.
I find it strange when someone who never wanted to write (eg a celebrity) rolls out of bed one day, decides to write a novel and gets published too.
I always saw writing as a vocation, and thought that being a writer is essentially who you are, not just a career choice you make.
CageFightingBlogger says
I was reading Roald Dahl at a very young age an thinking- I could do this. Dahl taught me 1) how to tell a story and 2) ALWAYS question the authorities.
Gamer Girl says
I've found the stories I wrote in first and second grade. I stayed in from recess to write an alphabet book in the school library in first grade. My first completed book. LOL!
I've always written. I wrote compulsively in High School. I write now. Writing for publication? That started in HS too.
J. R. McLemore says
It seems like most comments indicate the poster knew they wanted to be writers very early on.
I wish that was the case with me as I feel that I started very late. I'm 39 and I only started writing six years ago. I didn't even read much for entertainment at the time. One day, I took to Barnes & Noble on my work lunch break. I picked up a Stephen King book to read and fell in love with what he had created. I wanted the ability to create the same kind of worlds and excitement that he allowed me to experience.
That is how I became a writer. I became a computer programmer in a similar fashion. After playing Doom when it first came out, I wanted to program similar games, so I learned how to program computers. I've been programming for 15 years, although I've never written any games.
Anonymous says
I've always wanted to be a writer and have written short stories to amuse myself, since the age of eight. But I only started to get down to the serious business in the last three years and I'm now dedicating all my time to writing novels, although as yet I'm unpublished. I've probably left it too late to hit the big time, as I'll be 53Years old on my next birthday. But I console myself with the fact that I really enjoy what I'm doing and when it comes down to it,that's what's important to me.
Kathryn Magendie says
When I thought I wanted to be a writer versus when I actually became one has such a span of years I can't really put a number on the originating thought. So, really, my Writing Life didn't begin until my late forties.
KH says
I have played around with writing my whole life, but never took it seriously until a few years ago. I was a matter of self-confidence. Even so, it took me six months to get up the nerve to submit my first "real" manuscript for publication, and it was accepted!
Ray Anderson says
After I read "Tom Sawyer" ( I was about 13), I had the itch to write a similar outdoors/boyhood type of novel. I wrote it with pencil on reams of 6X8 unruled math paper. I knew then that I would always write–no matter what.
7legs says
For as long as I can remember. Congrats re Jacob Wonderbar!
AndreaDaleTTP says
After successfully writing and recording two filk/folk music CDs, when I realized that I wanted to write about some things in paragraph versus song form.
J. M. says
I was 8 years old and I realized people wrote stories for a living. Then, in my sophomore year of college, after trying "practical" majors that only bored me, I became a Creative Writing major. So it's write or die from now on out XD.
kaycamden says
I was at work one day, working. The first line of my WIP, in my protag's voice, just hit me. And wouldn't go away.
Five years ago if someone had told me I'd be writing novels I would have never believed them. I wish I could say I've been doing it my whole life like most of you!
Lisa R. says
When I was about 10 years old. I wanted desperately to be an astronaut and kept writing poems about it. I remember one day, I was writing a poem about becoming an astronaut and I had this realization that writing was the thing I really wanted to do–I mean where else were all these poems coming from? So I ditched my astronaut and started writing books. I wrote my first novel at 11.
Emily Wenstrom says
I’m told I made up some pretty crazy stories for my dolls and toys as a kid. In high school, I was determined I would one day exact vengeance against my parents in a no-mercy all-wrongs-exposed memoir. But somehow that didn’t translated into “I will be a writer.” Even when I finally landed on an English major, I thought I’d be an editor, not a writer. I didn’t think I had actual content in me worth sharing. Then I grabbed an internship at a local magazine where I was forced to write. I found that I not only was capable of it, but I also really enjoyed it!
Michelle says
The funny thing for me is that I started writing when I was six years old and have written SO many things in the span of 40 odd years, but KNOWING that writing was what I was meant to do as my thing in life didn't come until recently. All the signs were there but the epiphany that this was what I was meant to do came late for me. But I also think it happened that way for a reason because that span in between allowed me to experiment and go after great experiences that I believe have strengthened my writing ability and my perception of things around me. It's the way it was meant to happen and I'm grateful for it.
realityanalyst says
Hmm, it just sort of grew on me – in my teenage years, mainly, I think. I kept looking at other career options (band teacher, FBI agent, psychologist) and in each one, I thought that I’d do that and write books. And then I discovered that while those things were fine, writing was really great even when I hated it, and I’d much rather be doing that.
Well, I am a writer, but I’m a student too, at the moment. This means that about once a week I endure the following conversation:
“So, what’s your degree program?”
“Master of Theology.”
“Oh! Are you going to be a minster then, or do you want to teach?”
“I write children’s fantasy novels.”
“. . . I see . . . uh . . . why are you going to university, then?”
“To learn.”
“ . . . huh.”
And, occasionally,
“Yeah, but you’re going to have a real job also, right?”
Oh, well. 🙂
But I wrote my first full-length (and horrendously, eye-gougingly dreadful) novel at the age of thirteen.
Dorothy L. Abrams says
When I was 6, I caught the writing bug from my mother, who never finished any of her novels. She had starts and endings, but never the confidence to develop the plot that was in her head. When I graduated from high school, I shared her fear of the blank page but chose to study literature in college with an eye to teaching. I knew I needed a day job. Those day jobs were so consuming, I did no better than Mom…until I retired. Now for the rest of my life!