I'd always farted around with it, but then when I was about 30, I found myself caught between a kid and my father. My father, who'd always wanted to paint and had various reasons for not being able to do it, won millions of dollars in the lottery and had no more excuses for not painting... and did not paint. He'd pissed away his talent or his courage or something. (He disowned me and disappeared for the second time in my life: maybe he started to paint again later.) But then I had this baby, and I knew I was going to tell him to follow his dreams as he grew up, and how could I tell him that when I hadn't followed mine. So I knew I needed to do something, to be true to myself, to be a good example for my son, and to take advantage of the time before I lost whatever little chance I had the way my dad did. That's when I stopped farting around and daydreaming and started finishing stuff and submitting it regularly.
That's really interesting, Charlie; thanks for sharing it. Sounds like you made an intentional, individual decision. A lot of the stories below are like mine: we joined a community (the OWW, e.g.) of supportive fellow writers, and/or sort of "slid into it".
Well, this is probably a huge generalization, but it seems that the women get into it all through community and men as loners. Women, like Ilona, "sliding" into it, and men making a conscious decision, "I am going to be a writer."
It's a very small sample size! But you know I track gender stuff...
I'm not sure if we get into it differently; it may be that we approach it differently once we get into it. Perhaps women are more likely to seek out communities to get started... kind of like asking for directions when you're lost. :)
I was noticing that a lot of the women seemed to join OWW. I remember I didn't want to pay any money, as I was cheap. I did belong to Critters for a while.
Oh, I began writing as a child. By "farting around" I mean that I remember creating characters and drawing stories as early as third grade. I had my first narrative poem published in a local paper at 10, at 11 I organized my friends into a comic book company and wrote and drew comics with them all the way through high school, at 12 I started writing my first novel (an H. G. Wells pastiche)and I had three stories published in the school magazine the following year. All through high school I was writing comics, stories, and poems. In college, I briefly had a comic strip in the school paper, flirted with editorial cartoons for an alternative paper, wrote hundreds of poems and did a bunch of readings, and finished a couple dozen stories. But I didn't pursue writing seriously as a craft, with the intention of making it a business, until I was thirty. And that was the turning point for me finally improving and being able to do something with it.
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It's a very small sample size! But you know I track gender stuff...
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I'm not sure if we get into it differently; it may be that we approach it differently once we get into it. Perhaps women are more likely to seek out communities to get started... kind of like asking for directions when you're lost. :)
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When I first joined the OWW, it was FREE!
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