Question

From what age do you guys think a person is capable of writing? Not necessarily a book but generally speaking.

 

I would say in the 6-7 year age, depending on the maturity of the child. My daughter was having books made at that age, but it was very basic.

My cat went up the tree.
It would not get down.
Daddy got a ladder.

Something like that anyway. At age 4 she was reciting books she wanted us to write for her. Se would make the pictures and staple them together and me and her mother would write the words she wanted on them at the bottom of her pictures.

But she has had older sisters that pushed her along.

 

Aged eight I wrote a story that then appeared in our school's magazine . Can't include it in my credentials for some reason

 

I finished my first book when I was 13. I'd been writing for years before that. Anyone can do it, based on their education and interest.

 

I wrote a Christmas poem to read to my family when I was 9. It redefined the word 'doggerel' but everyone was too polite to say so.

 

i started telling stories in kindergarten. that much i remember. on the playground, a bunch of us would gather under the slide and i'd start telling stories and the other kids would listen.

dont remember writing until maybe 1st or second grade. because I wasnt allowed on the computer, i'd dictate and my parents would write them up and print them out for my and i'd put them in a binder. Then my parents got annoyed with me always wanting them to write for me, so my dad broke out his old typewriter, and i used that for a long time.
idk, to me, typing it up felt "official" lol. Like I was an "actual" writer, so I never wanted to handwrite them up because "that's not what writers do" (i was adamant about that ). yet somehow, i ended up with dozens of composition notebooks with my writing in it, so i must have gotten tired of the typewriter.

 

Interesting—my friend and I, in about 5th grade, would sort of crouch in a hole in the playground, where several drainage pipes met. One of us would dictate and the other would write. I still have our first story done that way, one long run-on sentence taking up one side of a piece of unlined brown paper (was probably off-white back then).

It's like we needed our creative spaces to spark the process, or we instinctively sought them out.

 

I wrote my first story when I was 6. It was a comic strip plagiarising Goldilocks and the three bears, only there were two girls and the bears ate them. I think my mum still has it somewhere.

I was also quite prolific as a teenager, only again, much of what I wrote was still plagiarised.

I did get an A for a short story I wrote for my English coursework. That one was more original than anything else I wrote back then.

 

I would have to say maybe 40 or 45. The thirties are a pretty good decade to practice. Some people pick up quicker than others. Other people never get it.

 

I don't think that's a good question, because to tell a story is different from to write a story, and writing is directly dependent upon how early your country's educational system starts teaching literacy. In the UK they start at age 4. In the Czech Republic, they start at around 6-7. In Finland, I believe they start at 7. In Hong Kong and Japan, they start at 3.

So while the 6 year old English child is reading basic words and sounding them out, and maybe reading easy books with one sentence per page (in a specific phonics pattern that allows for easier reading), the Czech 6 year old child will only now be starting to string up enough letter sounds to write at the word level, let alone read anything for real.

And I, the Chinese girl, at age 6 was reading Chinese comic books fluently and writing short stories. Am I more intelligent? No. School just started earlier for us. Below is an example of the Doraemon comic series me and my sister read at that age. It actually includes even a 4 worded poetic proverb (only really taught from age 9) on this particular page lol.



Anyway so I was already reading this, and I was already getting writing tests by age 6. I was required to write a day going shopping with my mum, or some such topic - 150-200 words. In Chinese that's more content than English content too because we don't use half as many "little" words (eg. to, of, the, a etc, and you can also use the root word to express the meaning of a compound, meaning you can use one word to express what would normally take up 2 words).

So, I was writing stories at the age of 6. In my own time, I was adding speech bubbles to all my pictures already.

So I don't think you are asking a good question - it's far too dependent on the culture you're coming from. But the cognitive ability to tell a story with language, from age 3-4 I'd say. Just watch the way kids start role-playing. The cognitive ability to learn literacy and write words and sentences, from age 3, if you wish. China and Japan both do it, and we're not smarter - we really just start earlier. Not sure about the other East Asian countries.

To be writing fluently - years and years. I teach 9-11 year olds and writing is simply a very technical skill that is hard to master.

I guess I'd want you to clarify your question. Tell a story, write words and sentences as a technical skill, write a story, write a coherent story, write a grammatically correct and coherent story - depending on which one you're referring to, the age will differ.

 

Agreed—the question is too open-ended and non-specific. A large part of the problem-solving process is in properly defining the question. In doing that you often find your answer.

It wasn't until my 30's that I had gotten all the clunky learning out of the way and had written enough to develop a nice flow and my work was starting to sound pretty good, though to be honest I still didn't understand much about story structure.

 

I'm 36 and my current project is the first fiction I've written that was halfway decent, so I can definitely relate to this.

 

It's partly because the brain doesn't finish growing until somewhere in the 20's, and the last parts to grow in are the most recent (evolutionarily speaking)—the apparatus of higher abstract thought.

 

Sentences? 6-7 for sure. That's about first grade in the USA. I remember writing a little story in first grade. They gave us these blank hardcover books to make illustrations and write sentences in, which we did on our own for the most part. Plus, my eldest is in kindergarten (5 year old) and it's been pretty clear that this year is all about getting them from, essentially, complete illiteracy (for some) to writing sentences at the end of the year and understanding them. My five year old grasps the alphabet and is just starting to memorize simple "sight" words (the, we, my, I, etc).

 

Depends on what you mean by "writing." Even very young children are capable of constructing very simple narratives. In that sense, they can write stories practically as soon as they learn how to spell.

Getting even more basic, any child who uses their imagination to play is creating a narrative, because that's what fiction is when you get right down to it. When a kid picks up two action figures or a pair of dolls and pretend that they're interacting, that kid is telling a story. What we do is just a more complex version of that, but with dolls and actions figures made out of words and a lot more performance anxiety.

Storytelling isn't something you're just suddenly able to do, it's a process of gradual improvement over time.

 

I never wrote anything I was not assigned to write until I was in my thirties, with the exception of snail mail letters, mostly to women. My granddaughter started writing stories when she was six. YMMV

My first was a 386 with a whopping 16 meg of RAM. Standard for the day was 4mb. I needed the extra RAM, and a math coprocessor to run my bootleg copy of AutoCAD, which installed from about 20 3 1/2" floppies onto a 500 mb HDD. About $2400. Dose were da days! An older brother's first new car was a 1969 VW Beetle. $1800. A Cadillac was about $5k. A Lamborghini-almost $20k.

 

At age four a person is capable of writing, or at least I was. Children begin to write at late preschool, learning to write the alphabet and their names. My mother was very set on teaching me how to write at an early age (that must be part of why I like to write).
I wrote my first book when I was 6 years old. Now mind you it was a picture book, and even at that time I was not a good artist, I was very good with words, especially for my age.

 

At the age he is capable to carry a pen and start writing. Writing is about imagination. Those who have a waide and deep Imagination are the ones who love to write to express their imagination which has no limit. Writing is one of the best way to enjoy expressing imagination. For me, I found out about my talent in writing ten years ago and since then I never stoped writing. I wish I knew about my writing talent at an early age. I think, if you have a talent in writing, you need to be lucky enough to know at an early age that you are a creative writer. However, I think the question should be, how a person could know he is a creative writer at an early age.

 

But writing is about language more than it is about imagination. I think the question here is at what age can someone develop that relationship with language and writing. Just curious, but since you mention not knowing about your talent, what made you aware of it and how did you not know?