I participate in a Twitter chat called #TweepWriter. It’s a community where writers answer a different question every day throughout the month.
Today was day 20, so this was the question: What was the first thing (poem, short story, book, blog post, etc) you ever wrote about?
I think I misunderstood the question because I said this:
Most of the others posted about things they wrote as kids, like “I wrote a story about a horse that has no friends. I was 9.” Plus, I didn’t really say what it was about.
So, I thought I’d take another stab at it.
The first thing I wrote was . . .
I don’t remember exactly. I mean, my childhood was a while ago. I remember writing some Nancy Drew fanfic and I wrote a story about a friend getting sick from drugs or something for a DARE writing contest. I won and had to read it in front of ALL the kids and ALL their parents and I think everyone in the school.
That was fun for shy me. I didn’t tell my mom about it until the morning it was supposed to happen.
Me: I’m reading my story at an assembly today. You can come if you want.
Mom: Wait . . . what?
That was around age 12. A few springs ago, my grandpa showed me something he found in a box. It was a poem about a coyote and had this at the bottom.
I was 11 in 1991. So maybe this was the first thing.
Anyway, there’s evidence that I wrote things at a young age, but I couldn’t tell you which was first.
However, many other writers knew what their first thing was, so now it’s your turn: What was the first thing you wrote? Tell us about it in the comments so we can all enjoy your young brilliance.
Allison Maruska 
One of the first stories I wrote still haunts me to this day. It was back in grade two or three. There were these two girls that I really did not get along with in the class. So I wrote a story about how they ate boogers and were totally dummies. Gosh did I ever get in a lot of trouble for that one! And those poor girls listening to me at the front of the class while I read my story aloud. Yikes I’m cringing now. I think it was a good lesson for me though about respecting others.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Ha! That sounds like a tough lesson. It’s kinda funny from the outside. 😉
LikeLiked by 1 person
Porn. For some reason everything I wrote was uber risqué, then efficiently burnt. ;0
E6
LikeLiked by 1 person
Ha! That’s awesome.
LikeLiked by 1 person
poem on the environment and why we should protect it. third grade writing contest. This is incredibly vivid for me because everyone who entered had their poem hung in the public library and I went to see mine. All the little laminated poems had ribbons on them. 1st-5th place and then honorable mentions. I was the only entrant without a ribbon of some kind at all. I stopped writing.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Oh no! That’s so sad! Why were you the only one?
LikeLiked by 1 person
I have no idea. I started writing again like a dozen years later, so don’t cry for me. But it was hugely mortifying.
LikeLike
Reblogged this on anita dawes and jaye marie.
LikeLiked by 1 person
To my eldest grandchild it seems completely natural to write, and write well, when the mood takes her, she will be 12 in October. She had a poem published last year and a piece of poetic prose is about to be, a piece of writing of such simplicity, not a word wasted, not a word needed. it took my breath away. For her it was no big deal, she said she’d written it in 10 minutes, first draft, published, job done. Long may it be so. mind you, teenage years to come! As for me, I started writing fiction at age 60, where did the time go?
LikeLiked by 1 person
I’m kinda jealous of your granddaughter! Good for her.
LikeLiked by 1 person
The first thing I wrote was cartoons.
Comics.
I wrote comic books for my older brother.
I was pretty young but he probably was in high school or starting college, so I would’ve been about seven.
Before that, I drew flip page stories. Lots of them.
Before that I did a lot of drawing. So storytelling kind of evolved from pencil sketches to cartoons to… actual stories.
When my other brother was either a sophomore or junior in high school, I had written a 40 page story that I asked his girlfriend type up. She made a few typographical errors in it and I was really upset at that fact.
Look at me now. I can barely type a sentence without making a typo.
I just figured people who could type, could type with no mistakes!
Unfortunately, writing kind of came and went with me. There were long periods of inactivity. I got back into it when I was traveling a lot in my first real job out of college, and I had a computer. So I wrote – often writing about the life I was living, but occasionally writing about things from my past. Recent past.
One day those will surface and you won’t believe the same guy who wrote that wrote Savvy Stories.
A few select critique partners have read them and they are 180° from Savvy Stories but dead on for the guy who wrote Poggibonsi.
I have one regret. That nobody told me earlier in life how to pursue things that interested me like writing.
To correct that sin of karma, I have a young authors club where I try to find those kids who can write, and who can do it early in grade school, and show them what’s possible. We published two books of their stories last year. We will do more this year.
It’s a start.
They won’t have to wonder about the first thing they wrote.
LikeLiked by 2 people
That being upset at the typos is hilarious.
I love how you’re encouraging young writers. Writing takes a back seat to all the other activities too often. They need to see the value in this thing they enjoy.
LikeLiked by 2 people
The kids enjoy it and I think on some level they absolutely are not surprised that at the end of the semester or at the end of the year, what they have written is going to appear in a book. A published book, that people can go and buy.
The kids seem to just accept this.
The parents, on the other hand, do cartwheels over it and their minds are completely blown that their child has written something that people can go buy online.
LikeLiked by 3 people