Why I started writing.

Our August topic is: What started you to write?

I can’t actually remember a time when I didn’t write. I was always scribbling something, somewhere. First with crayons, then with pencils and finally, joy of joys a fountain pen. The typewriter and computer came much, much later!

What I wrote seemed to be of far less importance than what I wrote with. My writing efforts were simply not appreciated by my family. At twelve-years-old, I was allowed to have the Girl comic as it was vetted and approved of by my parents for its educational qualities. From this source I began writing adventure stories for girls, one being a series about Virginia, Girl of the Golden West. My recollection of those early stories is that they were more than lurid, and I forgive my parents for their outright laughter on reading them.

I told stories to my children when they came along and we had tremendous fun with what we now call brainstorming. Each child had their chance to pick a topic, or start a story and off we would go, following the thread wherever it led us. I suppose I had always had a good imagination partly, I think, from being an early reader myself. I always had books around and made sure my children did, too. Because my daughter was into ponies, I decided to write a story about them for her thirteenth birthday.

I had no idea what I was doing, of course. I mistakenly thought writing chapters would be like writing lots of short stories and putting them together. Instead, I found it was hard work and I finished the book in time for my daughter's fifteenth birthday. But that whole process of putting a story together, like fitting pieces of a jigsaw together, fascinated and satisfied me like nothing else. I can only say I tinkered with writing from then on, cramped by a lack of confidence and no one to really share my ideas with.

It wasn’t until my late husband signed me up for a writing course that I got to grips with writing again. I found people who ‘got’ me, and I them. From small starts, I took up novel writing and now am happily working on book number eleven. Not a huge body of work, but one that satisfies me.

Visit these authors to see what inspired them.

  

Connie Vines http://mizging.blogspot.com/
Skye Taylor http://www.skye-writer.com/blogging_by_the_sea
Judith Copek http://lynx-sis.blogspot.com/
Dr. Bob Rich https://wp.me/p3Xihq-1ke
Beverley Bateman http://beverleybateman.blogspot.ca/
A.J. Maguire  http://ajmaguire.wordpress.com/
Fiona McGier http://www.fionamcgier.com/
Margaret Fieland http://margaretfieland.wordpress.com
Rhobin L Courtright http://www.rhobinleecourtright.com