Wednesday, December 7, 2016

W is for Why I Write

Paula explains when and why she started to write.  

Some people say, “I decided to write when …” or “I became a writer when …"

When I see comments like this, I’m very aware that I never ‘decided’ to write, and I never ‘became’ a writer. I’ve always been a writer, at least from the time I learnt to write. Before that I created stories in my mind, inventing adventures for my dolls and Teddy bear. It was a natural progression to write some of those stories and when I was about eight, my class teacher wrote on my report card, “She writes very good stories.”

Maybe I was blessed with an over-active imagination, or maybe, as an only child, creating and writing stories was my way of not being ‘alone’.

I was also a voracious reader and, inspired by Enid Blyton (a prolific children’s author in the UK at the time), I wrote dozens of ‘spin-offs’ from her stories, before progressing to stories about my own characters. I still remember a lot of my first full-length 'novel' (probably about 50K words) which I wrote when I was 10 or 11, about a group of children who converted an old barn into a theatre and produced their own plays in order to convince their parents they were serious about acting. I was stagestruck even then!

Once I reached my teens, I discovered romance, and wrote (very cheesy!) romance stories for my friends to read each morning on the school bus. I also wrote detailed diaries, first about the teachers I had a crush on, and then, of course, about boys. Wish I still had those diaries – they would probably be hilarious to read now!

When and why did you start writing stories?

10 comments:

  1. I understand the 'only child' and writing to have adventures too. Somewhere I still have the book I made about a Spanish dancer and a crime. I was probably still in junior school.

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    1. That's far more 'exotic' than my early stories!

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  2. I've been writing forever as well, although I never liked writing in a diary--I felt too much pressure to keep it up.

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    1. Not sure why I felt the need to write down every night about what had happened that day - including who said what to whom (etc) - but I did that in a 'page-a-day' diary for about 5 or 6 years from being 11.

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  3. I wanted to write children's books when I was young. I loved writing and reading. Then life got in the way. I wrote for work but never considered writing novels until I had my horoscope read by a big name astrologer. She said, with Uranus in the 9th, if I wasn't writing, I should be. The light turned back on, and I started taking classes.

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    1. I was too busy writing essays etc when I was at Uni, but started writing fiction again when my first daughter was a baby. i think that was a kind of escape from baby-talk all day!

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  4. I started writing in high school. It all stemmed from being a reader. It was then that I started reading romance, and the mantra "someday I want to write one of those" began beating in my head.

    I still do have those first attempts, and they are VERY cheesey, but I love taking them out to look at every once-in-a-while.

    Your barn/theatre story sounds fabulous! Have you ever thought of dusting it off and revisiting it to publish?

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    1. My first published novel was partly based on one of my teenage cheesy novels!
      The barn/theatre story would be fun to revisit, but I think I'm too out of touch now with today's kids to make it realistic.

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  5. I remember creating comics for my sister and friends. I would be under 10 then. I also wrote little plays which we performed around the school.
    Carol

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    1. I loved writing plays too, and we performed a couple with my Girl Guide unit when I was about 12 or 13.

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