Me too. I write much better than I speak. When I talk, I talk to get my point across, to hold a conversation with friends, what be it, and while I may inject some nice vocabulary here and there, it's nothing compared to my writing (at least, I hope). I think most writers are this way, and if I'm correct, Stephen King even said something about it. And I understand exactly what you mean when you say, "a desire to create worlds unknown." There's nothing more thrilling than creating whole geographies, people, cities, universes, with the clatter of my keyboard.
Started writing properly when I was about to turn 13, more than 11 years ago now. My schoolmates had all got a detention that I hadn't got one lunchtime, so I needed to do something in the library. I chose to write. I've been writing ever since.
All those babies and then there's us. I don't feel as old as I am, so posting a number seems arbitrary. But I started a 2 novel series a year ago November, with the NaNoWriMo challenge. A story just poured out of my head. Not having written fiction before, I've had to learn a lot. I'm still in love with my story, I write almost every day, I know I've made progress in my skills. People should know, a few of us don't start writing until we've done a whole lot of other things in our lives.
Seriously started writing as soon as I could hold the pencil -- way too shy to put anything out there until the past few years.
My older brother and sister taught me to read and write when I was four. At about that same time, my grandmother bought us a set of "My Bookhouse" books. I consciously wrote my first short story to entertain friends less than a year later. By the time I got to school, I was so bored with pretendting to learn the alphabet and basic words with the rest of the class that I would hurry up and write the "letters of the day" then write stories in the back of the class just to amuse myself. Which led to my getting in trouble for not paying attention in class. *sigh* I kept "getting in trouble" throughout elementary school, then, in high school, I was able to take writing classes and theater at which I excelled, and journalism, which required participation in the school newspaper, where I found myself once again, bored to tears trying to keep on track with the rest of the bunch. (I mean, seriously, how many times do you have to hear the difference between a banner headline and a story headline, font types, and column widths?) So, although my writing was always well received in school, it took a few years and getting out of the school system before I could actually sit down and write ... really write. thankfully, university viewed creative writing from an entirely different, and more receptive, perspective.
I started writing a book in middle school. I still have the handwritten manuscript. It is wonderfully awful and I would never throw it away. I remember turning out the lights in my room, lighting candles and listening to music. I'd scribble away for hours and felt like the coolest kid in the world.
Probably about 10 or 11. It's difficult to pick out a clear time when I actually started writing; it crept up on me.
NOTE: You WERE the coolest kid in the world! How awesome to still have that original manuscript! Prize it. Once you sell the 'biggie' that first story will be worth a fortune!
. I don't know that I ever consciously started as such, but I won a national essay-writing competition when I was ten. But I did know that I would like to write. After a life at work, I'm another that plunged into a NaNoWriMo challenge about four years ago. I've now got time to work on that novel - one reason I'm here.
After sad ending of my first 'love experience'. i was the 18 years old, and such a situation had a great impact on me.
I first started writing when I lived in Venice, Italy for a year, back in grade 11. I was playing Rome Total War and I joined the forum's creative writing section and would write fictionalized stories with backgrounds about the campaigns I played. I had quite the knack at it and a bit of a following on the forums. Then I would continue to write but I had never looked at it as something I could do other than for fun. I wrote for school, what I thought was, a very good chapter to a historical fiction on about a soldier in Napoleon's army (realizing only today that it's quite similar to A.C. Doyle's Brigadier Gerard!) Early my undergrad (now it's late in my undergrad) I learned that I could actually write and got a job at a foreign affairs journal. That's when I tried my hand at creative writing seriously with good results. Just a month ago the first play I had ever written was selected among many for a Drama Festival which I also got to direct. I was pleased that from the first line to the last, the audience laughed. That gave me the boost and encouragment I needed to believe in my talent and continue doing it with a goal to one day consider myself an writer.
I was always excited to create stories but never knew how up until around age seven when I finally learned to write sentences
