Glade Jul. Viggo Johansen. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
First of all, a very Merry Christmas to everyone! I love the holiday season and getting to be with family from all over the country, even if just for a little while. This is also part of the reason I haven’t been actively blogging as much this month — the holiday prep monster has been greedily eating my time in huge chunks. I need to work on getting as organized as my amazing friend Casey, who has three adorable young kids and an awesome craft business and still blogs constantly.
Anyhow, in all the Christmas madness this morning, my mother gave me a fun writing book. I picked it up after all my little cousins had gone down for naps or to attack each other with Nerf guns, and it opens with the author reminiscing on his love affair with books. This made me think of my own fall into writing as a kid — because it truly was a fall, with no hope of coming back.
As a little kid, I LOVED books, and around age 5 or 6, started writing all the time, though not quite as much as I was reading. However, this writing was more like little drawings of characters and a paragraph about them. In second grade, I graduated to writing a “book” on that big paper that kids learn to write on. It talked mostly about my class and how we wanted to go on a field trip. Plot was a bit thin on the ground, I’m afraid. I was able to include every kid in my class in the story, though, which was quite a popularity bump. In fifth grade, we had to write a story with our vocabulary words every week, and each week, I wrote a brief story about sisters Julie and Natalie, who managed to get into some pretty crazy adventures.
What has always drawn me into writing (and into reading, for that matter) is finding out the stories of interesting characters. Interesting characters fascinate me even now. What drew you into writing? What keeps you going now?
Novel Conclusions 
I love to tell stories and with writing you have a much larger audience than just talking. Especially since the internet came along. If I had the internet when I was younger I probably would never have stopped writing.
The only problem is that there are so many more distractions with the internet that can keep you from writing stories — like blogging! 🙂
I am the same as you – I was writing from about the age of 5. The question ‘and what do you want to be when you grow up, little girl?’ was answered, from the very first time, ‘an author’.
Imagination – that was what drew me to writing, I think. Freedom of expression kept me writing – the only way I knew positively released all bottled up emotions. The joy of creating a scene, crafting emotions, creatively expressing something keeps me very happy!