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Today's randomness prompt comes from Cathy Little over on facebook. (I'm never sure if people want to have their different platform presences connected, so I'm sticking to where the prompt was made.)

She asks: How did you know you wanted to/decide to write? [My daughter]* spends her free time writing stories.

(*Name redacted.)

I love this question, because answering it goes into all the different ways that writing can be a passion in one's life. I think there are two reasons to take up writing: because you're passionate about it, and simply doing so gives you joy; and because you're good at it, and doing so helps you make a living. I have the good luck to be able to intersect those two, although not necessarily always at the same time.

My joke is that I can date my writing career to second grade when I plagiarized my first poem. (Hey, the teacher said "write down a poem", she didn't specify "compose" as opposed to "inscribe on paper". It's not my fault she jumped to the wrong conclusion about authorship.)

My first original story was a collaboration with my older brother that we did as a combined history/english/penmanship final project the year we lived in Prague and were being home-schooled by our mother. (I was 11, he was 12.) This was entitled The Travels of a Time Machine and involved a trio of kids visiting all manner of key historic events with the time machine they built in the garage. (In retrospect, it's an excellent study in how we internalize misogynistic literary tropes. The two active characters were the boys who invented the machine and planned the trip, while the girl was the annoying tag-along comic relief, who also served as an "everyman" point of view because she didn't know in advance where the time machine was going. So the reader, through her POV, had to work it out from clues.)

I wrote a lot of emo poetry in my junior high years, keeping it private by the mechanism of composing it in a language I'd invented. The next actual stories I remember writing were for a high school English class on science fiction. There was a strong theme of "I'm really an alien from another planet and some day my people will come back for me." (See: emo poetry.)

But I didn't start working on longer pieces until my year off after graduating high school. The logistical reason for having the year off was that my Dad once again had a sabbatical year (like the one we spent in Prague) the year I should have been a senior, so rather than either trying to finish up at an American school in Munich or come back and do my senior year after a break, I just finished high school a year early. This left me free to do a lot of creative projects that year, along with sightseeing and teaching myself calculus. (Also doing some support work for my Dad's research, punching computer data cards and manually processing complex equations on a hand calculator. Kids, let me tell you about state-of-the-art technology in 1975…)

One thing we didn't have an excess of that year in Munich was English-language reading materials. This probably had a major effect on the amount of time I spent writing stories. I think I still have the output of that year in file folders somewhere. (I should probably get around to burning them.) I made a good start on maybe half a dozen various novels, all science fiction/fantasy of some sort. Mostly social/ecological fantasies exploring alien societies of various sorts, I think.

I wasn't really thinking in terms of writing for anyone else at that point. If asked, I'd say that I needed to write in order to get the stories out of my head because it was getting too crowded in there. (I think I wrote some emo poetry along this theme.) I had one dedicated reader that year in Munich: my youngest brother, who was so desperate for something--anything--to read that he was willing to make the deal that I'd let him read my stories as long as he never, ever commented on them. This probably wasn't necessary as a specification since it was hard to extract his opinion on things at the best of times back then.

When I started college, I continued writing extended fantasy worlds, returning to the use of invented languages as a technique for getting plot-prompts, as well as for exploring and developing the societies I was inventing. But I still didn't really have a writing community to participate in. There are times I'm so jealous of young people who are part of amateur writing groups, sharing their work with each other and getting feedback. No doubt such things existed. (I later found out that some girls I knew in high school were writing fan-fic at the time, but even though I'd tried to reach out to them, knowing we had common interests in SFF, I never managed to connect.) I did some creative writing for a college English class, but neither the teacher nor the other students had an interest in genre writing, so the only real feedback I got was, "I don't get this." I think I submitted one of the stories I wrote back then to a magazine, was rejected, and really had no idea where one went from there. I think I've written previously on the absence of mentors in my writing career.

But I wrote a lot, and plotted out even more stories than I wrote. And I did it just for my own enjoyment because there wasn't really anything else.

After college, I finally found science fiction fandom and had a chance at connecting with like-minded people. At this point, I'd shifted my writing output mostly into song lyrics, both in the context of the SCA and filk singing (though I was much more into writing original fantasy-based songs than parodies). The advantage of writing songs in this context was that there was a built-in venue for sharing them with people. The disadvantage was that sharing them required me to overcome paralyzing stage fright. In the long run, this was probably a good thing. I believed in my songs enough to want to break through. Song-writing was also a great exercise in paying very close attention to word choice and structure.

In the early '90s when I started grad school, I pretty much stopped writing songs. There are various reasons for that, but it would derail this particular essay. But I returned to writing stories, both novel-like-objects and--in yet another case of serendipitous context--short stories. Because when I needed a part-time job to support me in grad school (at least until I was able to take on TA jobs), I fell into working at a small SFF magazine. There's nothing quite like hanging out with authors and publishers to inspire any tendencies one has in that direction. And there's nothing quite like hanging out with published authors (and publishers) to give you opportunities to get your own work published. So by the time I finished grad school, not only did I have two novel drafts completed (one of which had been making the rounds of rejections) and several others in various stages, but I had 6 short stories published in professional venues.

Once the dissertation was finished and I could think about being creative again, I started working on the manuscript that became Daughter of Mystery. There are a lot of unfinished and unpublished stories in my files, both paper and electronic. Some may eventually get worked on again, some are best considered worthwhile practice of the craft but nothing that's worth a reader's time. (Unless the reader is stuck for an extended period without any other available reading matter.) But to get back the prompt that started this essay: When did I know I wanted to write? That doesn't even feel like a meaningful question. There was never any "want", it was always just "do". One might as well ask, "When did I know I wanted to breathe?" And that's the advice I'd give to aspiring writers. If you can substitute the word "breathe" for "write" and everything you say still makes sense, then you probably have what it takes to be a writer. And then it doesn't matter whether you're a professional writer or a published writer. The point is that you're a breathing writer.