What Made You Want To Write/Become A Writer

I think it all started when I was young reading my first ever "book" The Hungry Caterpillar, It took me into the world of nature, where those squishy green things on plants became lovable gluttons.
Ever since I've been reading Fiction to take me away from the bleak material world we live in and taking to a world of wonder that puts my own into an estranged light, and Non-Fiction to change and broaden my perspectives on worldy matters.

As I explored the wonderful world of literature I decided that the only way for me to truly understand the work I was reading was to create some of my own. I've always been creative (and modest ) but I never really had an outlet, so earlier this year I wrote my first short story; I absoloutley loved making it, hopefully when this account gets activated I'll upload it.

I also wrote my first poem for this week's poetry contest, wish me luck!

 

For me it was a mixture of Warhammer 40000 and heavy metal music. Dan Abnett's Gaunt's Ghosts series had this impeccable shroud of grimness about them, delivering to me morbid, larger-than-life tales that while completely out of this world in terms of realism, captured something human and universal beneath all the chaos-spawned horror and raging las-gun battles. It was a powerful and severe feeling, one that sunk into me like liquid seeping through porous rock.

Yet a lot of this was because how it connected to my love of the heaviest music on the planet. As I listened and understood the genre more and more, I grew to have an increasingly powerful fascination with its willingness to journey into the forbidden and distant realms of strange, mystical realms beyond our own. It seemed horribly unrealistic as well but it did not need to be "real" in the conventional sense to grasp at fundamental ideas, emotions, themes, and ideas that to me exist consistently throughout human history and the warzone of a mind that was this young Canadian banger's.

I soon began to desire to match the vision and the voice of morbid literature with powerful music - ideally, a sense of twisting, unravelling, and immense might, immensity, and unexplored depth. In said depths, the blinding, maddening, yet ultimately enlightening consequential horrors that would rise like some sort of mythic karma-like doom as the punishment for the cost of our beliefs and our lifestyles, sometimes incarnated in the form of living, breathing, sentient life or shapeless aberrations from the peripheral spaces of existence. Clashing against all of this, the iron will and potential for such that lays within all men, women, and whatever's inbetween to overcome and subsequently become the unconquerable and the conquering.

... Oh, and sneaking in as many metal references as I can, whenever I can. I hope to outdo the Guilty Gear series a hundred times over.

 

Videogames.

<hears collective gasp from the non-gaming world>

Yup, videogames inspired me to be a writer. The Legend of Zelda made me want to do fantasy, Mass Effect made me want to do sci-fi, and Red Dead Redemption made me want to do Western.

 

I think what mcjessi said (quoted) goes for me too:

I've always been writing, more or less unconsciously. As in it was never a conscious choice, I just had to, even back as a kid. When I was 8 or 9 i sat in writing class in school writing little stories about horses and filled notebook after notebook and the teacher had no choice but to give me yet another one Every one around me said (hopefully) that I would become a writer one day, and they tried to motivate me to let them read it, but I wouldn't.

when at home I wrote a diary frequently, just babbling about my feelings and thoughts, it was really my way of not going mad and to feel less alone. Later (at 13 more or less) I started writing "for real", a seemingly endless story about a girl and her life (and horses, of course ), relationships with people and so on. this developed into a side story which later became my first novel, but between that and the now finished story I stopped writing for many years, I can't even remember why anymore.

Last summer I was starting to write on a story again to kill time at night since I had neither tv nor internet, and a book I read put a thought into my head: Why don't I start writing a story that I could actually let people read? Something to try to get published? It was the extra motivation I needed to take it up again and I've been writing nonstop since. But when I was younger I never had a thought of being a published writer, or when i thought of it it was with a mix of "well, that will never happen anyway" and a shudder at the thought of sharing my work with anyone.

now there is nothing I'd want more than having my work published and read (hopefully even appreciated!) by others.

 

I've taken a lot of inspiration from games over the years as well. The big fantasy project that refuses to get off the ground these days was inspired by a "what if...?" of the opening scenes of Final Fantasy IX, and a couple of my more recent projects were offshoots of similar trains of thought. The ideas themselves have matured and moved well away from their earliest incarnations, but I still know where they came from. Keep playing, Link, and keep being inspired.

And thanks for reminding me to play Red Dead Redemption at some point.

 

I love to read and this led to me wanting to write about books. Eventually I just started to like writing more than reading.