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Another thread I'm re-making because the previous thread was HELLA GODDAMNED OLD and we're getting a reasonable influx of New People.

How old are you? And just so there's more than one question rolling through the thread, how old were you when you started writing? Did you write IN THE WOMB? How old were you when you started seriously writing, with intent to publish or intent to write a Serious Business story? I ask because, I mean, I wrote a story about talking dragons when I was like ten but I would say I really and truly started seriously writing closer to thirteen or so.

I'm currently twenty, and won't be legal to punish my liver until January.

I've actually been writing since before I could read. Back then I would dictate stories to my mother, and she would type them up on our old bluescreen Tandy computer. I debuted with such classics as "Squeaker: The Runaway Hamster" and "The Princess and the Well" (or it might have been "The Dragon and the Well;" I don't remember exactly).

I started writing down my own stories in first grade, and had a major inferiority complex about it because I would always take longer than my peers to finish my "creative writing time" stories. Then again, I wasn't the one writing about the adventures of a gecko that got flushed down a toilet.

Between sixth and seventh grade I made up my mind that writing was something I wanted to do forever and always, and every year since then I've become more Serious Business than the last. Everything I wrote before this year was crap. (I say that every year.)

So now I'm 31 and a HALF. Where is your god now? Oh yes, he's telling you that Charlie has been Srs Bsness about writing since 6th grade or so, when he realized that he could get prizes for writing stories. (He did, in fact, win that particular contest.) Of course, I had realized that I could make up better stories in my head since I entered kindergarten and was confused at the garbage that is d**k and Jane. I had to make up stories about d**k and Jane to make reading that junk tolerable.

Since my bored brother had taught me to read by the age of 2, I had already consumed several Hardy Boys books, as well as Encyclopedia Browns, was probably on the 4th book of the Wizard of Oz series, and had definitely completed the Chronicles of freaking Narnia at least once. (My mom was a religious nutjob, and only let me watch PBS, so reading was pretty much my only method of having fun with my spare time. Needless to say, I read a LOT.)

So guild: new question. What books did you read in your formative years?

I was raised on the Chronicles of Narnia, but I'm having trouble defining exactly which years were "formative." I know the Bunnicula series influenced my very early subject matter (lots and lots of talking animal stories), and that The Wheel of Time influenced my earliest attempt at a serious novel (which is probably why it flopped), and also that I picked up some weird genre conventions from a writer friend who read a great deal of Tamora Pierce (and it wasn't until I became familiar with Pierce's works myself that I was able to begin uprooting the majority of those conventions and forming my own). I also identify Sherryl Jordan's The Secret Sacrament and Robin McKinley's Beauty as influencing MOSI, though if you were to ask for specifics, I wouldn't be able to provide them.

Edit: I forgot to mention, probably due to blocking the memories in self-defense, that I also read some of the Xanth books in middle school, just before WoT, which is probably why a lot of my really early fantasy smacks of parody.

Age 21 here. If we're talking about coming up with stories and not actually writing them down, that's pretty much everything I DID in childhood. Dolls and stuffed all had names and histories and relationships with each other and so on. If we mean actual pen and paper stuff, that's been since I was 12, I think. But either way that was when writing slowly came into my "Jobs I want when I grow up" list. When I had a whole class saying they wanted me to keep writing a story and reading it out loud from from a Halloween writing prompt I was hooked.

Books I read as a kid were pretty much anything I could get my hands on. Baby Sitter's Little Sister, Encyclopedia Brown, American Girl books, a lot of Jean Craighead George books, and a lot of other things. Now that I think about it the first books I got into weren't really the genre I try to write about. I really liked adventure novels when I was little. Other than the stuff I read because my sister was into similar were mainly adventure books. Slowly adventure turned into Fantasy-Adventure though.