So am I, heh. This year's project is to develop my pitching skills. One of our local writing conferences includes three agent/publisher pitches and blue pencil sessions. I'll get some experience with my existing manuscripts, which won't really be ready for a few more years, but I think it's better to develop the business skills in parallel to the craft skills rather than be standing around with manuscripts not sure what to do with them. Target date for career change is July 1st, 2023, so just over 3 years left to get this stuff sorted out. Feels doable.
Okay. Fair enough. Sorry if I was insulting. I've done some reinventing too. From logger to fisherman to journalist to retiree. Lots of fiction manuscripts in the closet and on the hard drive too and not a single story or novel sold yet at the age of 66. Don't have the mercantile skills.
I apologize if I overreacted. And I appreciate the stereotype is real - some people conflate creative careers with hobbies.
At 16 I was writing truly appalling detective novels, and the scary thing was, I actually finished two of them. I found the first one I did last year, printed and bound by myself. It was so bad I wasn't able to read it without cringing, so I actually took it outside and burnt it.
At sixteen... I was writing before that, but since there's no physical proof of anything written before I turned eighteen... I'm going to assume that I was marginally worse at sixteen than I was at eighteen. And what I had written at eighteen was cringe. I wrote my surviving high school writings in script form, because I guess that I thought that that was the best way to write comedy or something. But I believe that I was at the height of my prolific writings at 23-24, due to the freedom of not living in a crowded house. And I'm still better now than I was then. But at sixteen? Hell no! I'm secretly glad that I don't have surviving writings from that time.
I can sum that up very efficiently: "Ooh, laserguns are a cool and the girls in my class are really hot. I need to combine this."
I started writing a diary at around the age of 13. I was into reading and writing books and at the time I was inspired by that book “The Diary of Anne Frank” - that was talked about in English class. She was only 13 years old when she was writing her diary and she inspired me to start writing one too. I would keep up the writing once every 3-4 days - depending on how exciting my days were and how much I needed to “remember”. It was such a joy reading back on experiences long forgotten and you won’t believe the all the details we forget about 1-2 months down the line when you don’t keep a diary. I stopped keeping a diary at around 19 and disregarded it and cast it aside in a plastic bag stored in the attic somewhere. Maintained an active interest in it. If not in writing, then in reading what others write, certainly.
At 16 I did not write. I was drawing drag race cars and engines. And I was building model cars. I had no interest in writing.
I didn't get the writing bug until I was over 50. I just wanted to try something new. Then, I found I really enjoyed it. Once I retired from my job as a high school science teacher, I jumped into writing with two feet.
I already posted about my writing when I was 16, which is when I came up with the idea for The Beastseekers. But I now understand it in better detail. It was when I started to really love nature and the woods. I had always played in the woods since I was a kid, and I always liked it, but @ 16 I suddenly started to love it in a much deeper way. I still remember the day—I was walking home from the bus stop, coming home from school, and it was the first chilly day of fall. That was when I first started to love that shift in the weather too, from summer to fall, when suddenly all the humidity is gone and everything feels different. Crisp and cool. I would usually just walk straight home on the street, but there was an empty lot (no house there yet) and you could walk straight through into the woods. I did that, for no real reason, I just wanted to sit in the woods and experience this new feeling I had noticed—this appreciation for the weather and the woods. I went a little ways in and found a nice little sheltered spot, and I sat there for like twenty minutes or so and came up with the idea for the new series called The Beastseekers. When I got home I wrote the first story, which began with that shift to fall weather and my realizing how much I liked it. It was the beginning of my writing becoming semi-autobiographical.
I realize this is a resurrection of an old thread, but it is still interesting. At sixteen, I'd been writing for seven years. Yeah, really. My writing at sixteen was age-appropriate, tending toward the verbose, cliche, and derivative. Structurely, it was pretty decent, but I read a lot and understood how stories flowed. True terribleness raised its nasty head when I tried to write like someone with more life experience than I had. An outstandingly bad line flowed from my Bic pen when someone in my book was having a baby in unexpected conditions. "Boil water," commanded my character. "Lots and lots of water." After I wrote that, I spent a lot of time wondering what on earth people did with all that boiled water.
Oh, this is indeed a fun thread. I like it sometimes when someone randomly "necros" one of them. At 16, I was working on becoming either a professional hockey player or a rock star, or a professional hockey player rock star. I didn't get very far, but at least I was on stage a few dozen times, and scored an overtime goal in the playoffs. Writing wasn't something I was thinking about at the time, but I'd built a solid foundation, mostly thanks to my mom, who had me reading quite prolifically from a very young age, and instilled my lifelong love for SFF. Unless you're a one in a million freak of nature kind of person, it's unlikely you're going to be producing anything worth reading at 16. And if you are, it's going to have to be targeted to an audience in the same age group, or younger. This is because you do need life experience to write anything interesting or meaningful to adults. It's not something that can be taught; you just gotta live some life. Writing while young is still valuable experience, and lays the tracks for what can be achieved later in life. So, young writers definitely should still do it - don't get me wrong. The strong reading foundation led to me being noticeably very good at writing fiction and non-fiction throughout my schooling, but again, I never really thought about it. I think it only really hit me when I had to come up with a (long) short story for my "Philosophy and Science Fiction" class in my third year at university. It was a cool story, and I got an A, with lots of encouraging comments from the professor. But then I slipped right back into writing essays and theses and didn't get creative again for a long time. ...I need to pump the brakes here before I write another freaking essay! Anyway, at 37 (late thirties seems to be a good age for this!), I decided that I'd been wasting my life and had to try cultivating my last remaining natural talent. I turned that university short story into a novel. It wasn't great (at the time!), but it started me along the path of trying to become a better writer. And I've made a lot of progress since then, which is cool, and plenty of that can be attributed to this site and its members !
At 16, I wasn't capable of writing anything worth reading. To give perspective on that, the only thing I remember writing at that age was this computer troubleshooting "manual" for high school. It was just pages and pages of yapping. No paragraphs, no punctuation and absolutely zero structure. It was just an endless sentence that flowed from the first page to the last. It's funny to look back at those days. I wasn't capable of reading or writing for complicated reasons that I've explained in other threads, but I did dream of my own stories very much. I'd just fantasize about them because I had no way to put them down in any way. Lol, that was probably for the best!!! I'd probably write some seriously embarrassing things. But in spite of that, there were instances when the content (not the writing!!!!) did impress my high school and middle school teachers enough for them to read it aloud. Life is a journey. I'm a lot better at writing now!
I wouldn't even have considered myself a writer back then. Decades later, I am so continually in awe of the skill and seasoned craft of so many other writers who have obtained enough of a deserved public notoriety as to be read and reviewed widely, that I would only ever dare consider myself an amateur writer today.
I had imagination back then, in my teen years. School assignments probably fueled my creativity for it when that young. But many things in life occupied me and gave plenty of distraction. I mean with a lot of struggles, I was in no position of a playboy. Later on the need to make stories increased though, and though I was attempting to, struggling to make ends meet remained great enough to be in the way. Only when much older with a diagnosis of what would seriously threaten my life, I willingly focused on what I wanted to do most with what time I would still have, and I pursued the writing I wanted to do much more, and gave it priority over other things. I had already made other important changes in my life then.
When I was 16, I still did not know I wanted to create stories. I remember sitting on a rock in a park and thinking how pointless life was. Then a cat came up to me and started to hunt small insects around where I sat. And I was brought back to reality and thinking, if a cat can enjoy life so simply, so too can I. I had the beginning of a universe inside my head at that time, I just did not know I wanted to write it all down.
I wrote a romance when I was 12 years old. I based it on the twenty or thirty Harlequin Romance novels I had read at my Grandmother's house. Other then the Library at school, which limited the number of books you could check out, it was my only access to extra reading material. I also came across The Two Towers at my Grandmother's house. She said my cousin from another state left it there. I read it not knowing it was a trilogy. I threw the Harlequin I had written out after that. I did not write anything seriously except school papers and work assignments until about 2007 or so, and then, just for fun.
I didn't attempt any prose until I was in my twenties, but at 16, I fancied myself quite the poet. I even had a couple of beatnik turtlenecks, lol. I was very into the poetry of e.e. cummings and the lyrics of Jim Morrison and Beck. I was all about rhythm and cadence and the flow of language, but I wrote utter nonsense. It sounded cool, but it didn't actually mean anything most of the time.
At 16 I thought I was going to be Queen of the World, so not much time spent thinking of writing. Other than a few disturbing (embarrassing) poems, but otherwise had no thoughts on becoming a storyteller. I was 41? or 42? when I wrote my first actual story.
Even if you don't have the life experience at this point, starting at a young age like this gives you a boost. Take the view that you are learning the craft of story telling, and it is okay if the current results are subpar. This is when you look at the subpar work and look for the errors and mistakes. Then do your research so you learn to fix those mistakes. Consider where your writing will be in a decade, with all the time you have spent honing your craft.
Other important changes involved eating, for one thing, and choosing what is ethical, healthy, and tasty. I finely honed doing this. As for starting me off in wanting to write, I read a lot of books and there was writing I saw inspiring to me. Tolkien was included among those, for me too.
I was a regular columnist in the local paper with high school news. Wrote a feature about our field trip to Expo 1970 in Japan. I was already a bit of a local celebrity. I also wrote agonized deeply heartfelt cringeworthy poetry. I had a feeling I wanted to write more but didn't have any great fiction ideas and just couldn't get interested in what was going on around me or what I had witnessed in the 1950s and 60s. In April this year my memoir of those 1950s, 60s and early 70s in that small isolated coastal village was published by a major Canadian publisher and I am now a local celebrity again.
