Everyone has a story. In the case of most on this forum, some may have more than one. What I want to know if how or what made you want to start writing?

Ironically for me when I was little, my parents had to pay me to read. Now it seems they can't get me to stop. A few years ago I wrote a story for little kids and gave it to one of my cousin for his fourth birthday. His mom read it to him once and immediately afterward he asked her to read it again.

I think that's what first inspired me to write. Since then it has become my favorite hobby. Of course I find that once you get started, it's nearly impossible to stop.

So that's really how I started writing. Funny how God can turn something as horrible as jealousy into a wonderful gift.
Elisabeth AKA Ana

Moderator's Note: Fixed spelling, punctuation and grammatical errors and fixed run-on sentences.

Good thought, Ana, I love how you finished that. It's true too, how God can take evil and use it for good. There's a testimony right there.

I think I started wanting to write when I was in kindergarten, I wanted to make picture books. After a while (years later) I seriously got into the drawing thing, I would still love to be an illustrator. My only problem with that is, I can't draw good people. Just animals. But anyway, I had a hard time finding really good books which I enjoyed. Always there would be questionable content, or the author wouldn't tie up the ending right, or I wanted to know something else about the characters.

Ok long story short, I decide to write the books which I would want to read, but I couldn't figure out how to get the stories out on paper or webpage. But I had the characters, and the plotline, and the characters themselves just seemed real to me (I know they aren't really, but I had that feeling). And I love daydreaming, so that helped a lot. But I never got past the first two pages of any of the five or six books I wanted to write.

Then I discovered Holy Worlds via the Rebelution forum. Thanks to this site and everyone on here, I am now further in my first book then ever I was before. Whew. So there's my story. If you've stuck with me this far, thanks for reading!

Wow Ana! Yes I would have have to agree. It's amazing how God works and most the time you don't realize it until you look back over past events.

Well, Ciela Rose, I didn't want to become a writer at that early of an age. At that point I wanted to do something far from writing. At the time it had sounded so... boring. Boy, was I wrong!

To be honest I only started writing a few years ago and even then it started with two pages of a story. I had no idea where the story was going or if I would even look at the writing again. But I stuck with it, and I'm thankful.

To be honest, my characters sometimes seem like my best friends. I like to tell my mom that I'm really close to my main character. In fact, we're "practically inseparable."

I also wanted to be an illustrator and like you was only good at drawing animals for a long time. Finally I got up the nerve to start drawing people. (Of course, my very first people always looked away so I wouldn't have to draw their faces.)

Well, I wrote a couple pages of a story or two when I was about 9, but it wasn't really very important to me or anything. I couldn't write well and couldn't really come up with any good story ideas. But I decided to try NaNoWriMo last November, because I always love a good challenge, and it really got me started in writing more. Then I found this forum and my writing slowly got better. I love writing in my spare time, though I haven't been writing as much lately.

I have an odd story on why I write.

I highly dislike writing school papers, so you may think its odd I am on a writing forum. Well my Language Arts class for the year is a unit study on Lord of the Rings. While reading it I found out I highly like elves. I got so interested in elves I found out in Iceland that they have a college called the Icelandic Elf College. So my mom assigned me a project to write a one page fantasy elf story. The one page story turned into a seven page report called Quest of the Elves. After I have read it again and I see so much I want to change so I have started writing a book called Quest of the elves.

My story is short. I hated English and writing and all that stuff until about the time I turned 15. Then I wrote a story about an epic camping trip I went on.

Three years later now, I have written well over 320,000 words in various novels, lots of short stories, and a few non-fiction stories.

I started out by writing my auto-biography at age eight or so. Needless to say, I didn't have much material to work with.

Well, I have always loved reading, so I never had a problem there. I actually read over 62 books in one summer (2006 maybe?)

Anyway, I just liked reading about other characters and would get mad if a series stopped, so I make stories to go after the real Authors books. After that, I made my own characters and daydreamed alot about their world and such... then I had issues, and still do, with some of the people I hang out with and they don't treat me and my love for reading and knowledge nicely... so, I kind of stuck to my writings, characters and stories to pull me through.
Then I finished a tween-ish 128 page story with my sister and self-published it. My 'friends' ignored me even more but my two younger cousins read it and brought it to school with them. Now they have done reports on it, read it in class and put it in their school library.
That really helped with my passion for writing.

That's us The Writing machine team (We're twins if you didn't know)

I'm the EXACT way as Serena... we liked to spend hours as little kids, creating all kinds of stories that happened after we finished a book we liked. And I still do, but now with my own characters

I've been a lover of reading since..well since I learned how to read. XD And I've been drawing since I could pick up a pencil. I had written poems in school (back in 2nd grade before home-schooling) but I never wrote anything really serious..

One of my friends, who was 12 at the time, was writing a horse story, and I was inspired to write one myself. (I really looked up to my friend.) I was 11 years old when I started my story, and I have written several unfinished ones. Not counting the ones up in my head that don't have enough of anything to start a story right now!

I write off and on when I'm inspired otherwise I don't produce anything that reads well. I actually think I should be praying more about it and God may give me more words to complete something. <3

I've just loved to write since I knew what writing was. I'm a storyteller at heart, when I was only 3 or 4 years old I dictated a story to my mom about a prince and princess, and I ended it "Look for more adventures of the beautiful princess and the handsome prince coming soon!" Guess it's just in my blood.

I started writing short sci-fi stories in third grade while I waited for other students to finish their work. It was somewhere between Star Wars and Star Trek with the space/ground adventure ratio. To be honest, the writing was terrible. Now I'm revamping it into a collection of short stories entitled "The Anglymna Campaign."

I used to HATE writing, but I loved stories and reading. Then I began to write a story idea I had, and found that writing was kind of fun. I wrote three or four versions of a an introduction to a story that was pretty much terrible and cliche and never got past a chapter and a half. A couple years later I decided to write a different idea that I had, and I wrote maybe four chapters of that before letting it drop for a while. When I picked the story back up, I started back at the beginning and finally got something that I liked. That's the story that I'm working on now, The Armorbearer. I've also had a few story ideas that I've written a little of to work on after this one, and I wrote a script this April for Script Frenzy. The funniest thing about how I got started writing, is that I am using two names I came up with in my first, terrible story in the one that I'm working on now, so I guess that story was worthwhile after all.

I, like ArmorBearer, hated to write, but somehow I was drawn to writing, I would think of one thing and write it down into my stories. I am very thankful I found this forum!

Once I was thinking that someone could make a really awesome movie, and was lamenting that it hadn't been made yet, so I started to write it into a book. Needless to say, being my first piece of writing, it wasn't very good. XD But now I'm working on another story that's a bit better, hopefully.

::brushes dust off thread::


I started writing because my sister was. I must have been about 8 or nine, and as she was my favorite and only big sister, I wanted to do everything she did--write, play piano, etc. (Also, I really loved the stories she was writing...) I started one story, then gave up, as it didn't have a plot. About two or three years ago I started writing again, just little scenes that didn't fit into any big story, except for one Narnia fan fiction which I actually completed. Then I wrote a full story in my ''scribble notebook'' and that inspired me (though the story was horribly lame) to write a story with a complete plot and deep characters. (even though I think that it's still lame)

When did you start writing? What caused you to get into it? How long have you been a writer? When you first started, why did you write?

And how has your perspective changed since then?

I think I've always had writer characteristics. When I was younger, I was an avid reader (then I grew up and figured out that there wasn't much worth reading ) - and I was always "rewriting" the stories in my head. I was always thinking up stories, whether for Legos or dolls or Hot Wheels or just in my head, but it wasn't until I was 14 that it actually occurred to me to WRITE some of these fantasies down.

I first started writing on - promise not to laugh? - the Lego club online forums. There were some fanfiction threads going around, and I thought "I've got an idea... might as well try it!" So my first "real" stories were, in fact, fanfiction for some of the Lego lines. Really, it is okay if you laugh - it's pretty ridiculous. But the other clubbers loved my story, so I wrote another, and another, and my style rapidly developed. I grew out of the forums - my stuff was simply getting too long to post. It didn't take me long to realize that I loved to write, so I moved away from fanfiction to original ideas. And the rest, they say, is history.

I started screenwriting in a similar way, testing the waters on an online forum. However, I can explicitly blame Melody Kondrael for getting me into screenwriting. She talked about it, sent me scripts, showed me websites... and finally I caved and tried it. Since I was already a writer, screenwriting accelerated rapidly. My first script is in production this week, praise God!

All along the way, God has perfectly timed writing in my life. He first sent it when I was bored and friendless, recently moved to a new state, and He's since used it to teach me and guide my life in innumerable ways. I don't think I would be the person that I am spiritually if I hadn't started writing.

Awwwwww! That's so cool, Philli! And it's awesome how God has used that in your life. I've found that's often the case with writers, me included.

I know I've used writing to cement my beliefs in my head, and just by going through them in world view papers and such.

But I can't remember ever not writing. When I was like three, my mom says I'd make books out of stapling paper together and drawing and putting single words together along with illustrations.

And I can remember trying to take Bible characters and writing down new "Bible stories" using them.

And when I was eight I filled up a bunch of notebooks with TERRIBLE stories. About faeries mostly. And then I liked poetry for a while...and I don't know. I've always lived like that. And my siblings were forced into saying their lines so I could see my stories acted out. LOL! (thanks siblings!)

What kinds of things do you screen write? (You can pm me if that's too off topic to answer here. )