Kristina England - Writer: So when did you start writing?

I think most writers get this question so I'll answer it for you today.? It's a two-fold question really as most people ask me when I started writing poetry but it's not a good baseline for when I really took pen to paper.

My mother can tell you that as soon as I could speak, I was a storyteller.? I was the child that didn't have an imaginary friend.? I had an imaginary city.? That's right, an imaginary city in my parents' bathroom.? The weird random diamonds scattered across their bathroom wall became windows to apartment buildings in which all my imaginary friends had different lives going on.

My mom would probably have a better idea on how old I was when this city begain but I do know that I was extremely young - probably around 5 years old.?

By the time I was hanging out at my grandmother's house, either my mother or my grandmother decided I needed to write my stories down.? So I got post-it pads in which I wrote stories on multiple stickies at six and seven years of age.?

My mom then trained me on her typewriter and away I went with my first "novella" at 8 years old.? Needless to say, I didn't finish the novella.

What I discovered later on in my teens was anything over three pages long became a never ending project.? I could never tie up the story.? If I kept it short, it wrapped up, but epic was never really my thing.

At 15, I was introduced to "creative writing" in the classroom, which included poetry.? I didn't quite get poetry but I wrote my first haiku and was all excited when it was one of three poems in the class that the teacher submitted to a contest.

I stopped writing for a year around this time as I was a teenager and although I loved telling stories, I wanted to socialize, not sit down in a corner and write.

At 16, I lost my favorite math teacher to suicide and found the need to sit in a corner and write.? I returned to poetry, not fiction, and began to write about my feelings rather than about imaginary characters.? This decision would help me through a year and a half of watching my grandfather deteoriate from Alzheimers and his expected death in December 1998.

I would then turn to writing personal (or confessional) poetry in college and grad school.? It wasn't until after grad school that I returned to storytelling in my poetry - I no longer felt the need to write about me.

There was a point in undergrad that I actually went back to fiction for a year and entertained my dorm room buddies with spooky stories, but it was only a phase as I decided to commit myself to my poetry from that point on.

Why write about this now?? Well, it's always helpful to understand the writer's history.? It also ties into where I am now.? Recently, I not only started writing form poetry, but I've also found myself craving more than poetry.? It's the reason I relaunched Worcester Storytellers.? It's also the reason I started writing fiction again.? I had a failed attempt at a fiction piece a few months ago but it was more because the story didn't feel right.? Yesterday, I had a piece come to me that felt right and so I sat down and have been working on it ever since.

It's funny how everyone's story is different.? Some people picked up the pen due to a major change in their life.? Others, like me, started writing at such an early point in life, we can't even remember not writing.?

The many layers of life and how those layers unfold is what makes it so beautiful and vulnerable at the same time.? It's the challenges that make us think a different way and shift with the tides.? But it's all worth it in the end (at least, I'm a firm believer in that idea).

Source: http://kristinaengland.blogspot.com/2012/10/so-when-did-you-start-writing.html

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