At what age did you start writing?

When I was 4/5, I would create these alternate endings/spin offs from fairy tales - especially Cinderella. Except I couldn't write anything and I would draw a series of images and explain my story to anyone who'd care to listen.

Although, I never 'wrote' down any story for almost the next 5/6 years, I did make a lot of them up.

The first one I wrote was called 'Mystery of the Pansies'. It will read off as heavily cliched about a bunch of teens who get stuck in a ship and have a mystery in their hands.

I was never really into writing. In fact, I hated it all through my childhood. Language arts was usually what I had my lowest grades in. I always struggled with writing and I was the last in my class to start cursive writing.

That is, until grade 7. I had read a full length novel for the first time in.. well, ever. I hated reading but I loved this book. It was Airborn by Kenneth Oppel.

After that, I devoured every book I could get my hands on.

It didn't take long after that that I wanted to start making books end the way I wanted them to. I wanted characters to be from my own mind. In that, my first novel arose. I started writing Night in love half way through grade 7 in a beat up little yellow notebook that I still have to this day. Though Night in love had changed drastically throughout the years, it is still a piece of my childhood I hold onto. That and I have never given up on Faetred and Athira. They will always be my favourite characters, whether or not I chose to keep them.

Um. ^^ the first story I wrote (that I still have) was when I was around five. I had that paper where half is space is a picture, and the bottom half are lines. Anyway, I don't know which one I wrote first, but one was about a family of seals, and the other was about my adventures in caves, making friends with bats

In fifth grade(: I would have been like 10 or 11. We used to write a story ever Wednesday in English. I don't really remember any of them that well. I think I knew I wanted to be a writer in 6th grade when we wrote in a notebook and at the end of the year read some of the stuff we'd written aloud. A long time ago I submitted some of it (Angels From Ashes) that I had edited a little bit...It's not very good.

~peanut~

I've always liked making up stories. When I was in elementary school I used to go around the playground making up alternative endings to TV shows and movies. At the time I wasn't into English and I didn't think much of it. I hated cursive with a passion and back in third grade I was even in resource for English (if my friends find out about that they'll never let me live it down, because that's what I'm majoring in). But I didn't need it (honest). I was the smartest one in that class and the only reason they put me in there was because my brother had behavior problems and my mother claims I was slow at reading (I neither agree nor disagree).

By sixth grade I hated spelling (I still suck at it) and my teacher had to bribe me to get better. In seventh grade I didn't really like my English teacher but by this point I realized there was something with English that wasn't with any other subject. My favorite English teacher EVER was in eighth grade and it was then I wrote my first story (I found it the other day and it makes me laugh).

I started my first novel freshman year (I also still have that) and I rewrote it sophmore year along with starting another novel. I took a creative writing class (finally) my junior year and I loved it. I wrote my first short story along with my first poem (I had already started writing songs long before that) and it was earlier than this I had decided I wanted to be a writer.

Reality hit me by the end of my junior year and I decided I wanted to become an English teacher (but I never lost site of my dream to someday get published) and by time my senior year I got to do an internship with my old eighth grade teacher (it was SO much fun;)) I also took AP English (who's in resource now) and advanced creative writing. My grades skyrocketed that year and now there's no doubt in my mind what I want to do.

Sorry, that was more of a bio

Oh jeez.

I started writing when I was 12. My first book was about three kids who had special powers but only when they had their Item.

Yeah, it was a boring book.

Anyways, I didn't finish it because I didn't have its plot all planned out when I started it (it was an accidental start, I was just randomly doodling a prologue in the back of my friend's notebook). So, that's happened twice (out of the three novels I've started), and I'm on my third novel now - WHICH I HAD THE PLOT FOR BEFORE I'D WRITTEN EVEN THE FIRST WORD.

So, a word to the wise - don't start a novel without a plot, you'll probably drop it out of confusion of what's supposed to happen next.

-Alzora

I can't remember. But I have this "memory box", and at the very bottom is a badly illustrated, crookedly written picture book about a cat and mouse, which apparently, I wrote. So...longer than I can remember. I've always been a bookworm, and I used to not know how to read in my head, but I read anyway. As a result, I love to read out loud. Skype friends can vouch for me there.

Anyway, I suppose I dropped it for a while, but I did keep a journal. I decided to try again my whole life later, when I was eleven-ish, so I wrote little snippets here and there instead of doodling during class. Of course I still doodled, just less frequently. Even before I decided to start writing, though, I'd come up with these crazy "what-if" ideas -- like what if a girl fell from her father's shrimp boat and nearly drowned until a water spirit appeared before her and called a dolphin to carry her to the surface? Or what if the craters in the moon are each a portal to a different dimension that can only be reached without a space suit, which is why no one's discovered it yet? You get the idea.

Anyway, between the snippets and such, I'd often come up with various melodies that stick in my head for days on end. So I began writing words to match them. That, my friends, is how you milk a cow I started writing stories and music and stuff.

About 8 or 9. My first story was about a guy who hates animal but was saved by a dog after falling in a sewer.

I started really developing a passion for writing when I was about five, around the time when I also was really getting into reading. I had a variety of books, for all different ages, that I read. I read Harry Potter at about five as well and that definitely influenced me because I still like writing fantasy and things like that. I remember my first story I wrote and illustrated with markers. It was about a rat princess who was kidnapped by some other evil rat man thing.

Yeah.

The first time I started writing outside of school I was about twelve. I read twilight (hey, don't give me that look! At the time, it wasn't overly popular and excessively hyped up) and wanted to write fanfiction haha
My first story absolutely sucked. At the time I thought it was going good, but looking back on it... man... it really sucked XD

I have pages and pages of stories I wrote at like 6 or 7 so that's technically when I started, but I didn't really consider myself a "writer" until about 11, when I first tried to write a novel. I failed miserably, but that's when I started.

I started at about 8. :B In 4th grade we had a whole class devoted to writing, and I remember my first "writing experience." We had a daily prompt and we had to write about how we ate Oreo cookies. I wrote a terrible simile but my teacher loved it, and from there I was hooked. I'm actually working on a story I started when I was 11 XD I gave up on it for a long while, but now I'm out of high school and thinking it deserves to be brought back to life.

I started to read in the first grade when my teacher gave me those little picture one word a page books and then decided that I wanted to make one up. I attempted a "novel" which was....a tragic failure in retrospect, but awesome to my 3rd mind. And, to make it worse (?) it was horrible attempts at fan fiction. Whenever I got bored with a "book" I would kill of the characters in some pretty nasty way. I was a pretty messed up kid back in the day. :"D

well, I started a story when I was in 3rd grade... But never finished it, it was probably only about 2 pages typed by the time the due date came... it was for school, so if that doesn't count then I started one in 6th grade, but I didn't get very serious about it until 9th grade... I'm going into 10th this coming year.

Wow, I'd imagine I started writing later than everyone on this site. I started at 19 almost four years ago.