Since this IS a writing community, I was just wondering, how and when did you exactly get into writing creatively? I mean, I know most of us started in first grade, but when did you take interest into writing what you like?

My parents taught me to read at a very young age. We would take turns reading a page out of a Dr. Seuss book until I could easily read the whole thing by myself. I immediately started to think about how I could write cool books too! My first children's book, I wrote when I was 5. No, I didn't get it published or anything of the sort, I wrote it for my little sister. It was about a family of pencils and where ever they walked, they drew a line across the ground and one day the young pencil broke her lead! And the older brother pencil took her to the hospital to get her sharpened. The rest.... is history... HAHA

I got interested in writing after reading work on I-Mockery and The Best Page in the Universe. I loved their writing styles and I wanted to adopt and morph them into my own to hopefully make people laugh. I've been writing ever since, trying to improve with every new thing I write.

I first started writing when I was very young... I might have been eight or nine years old. I guess I just thought it would be fun, so I got on the computer and started typing away with two fingers in Microsoft Word. At first, I tried to write a ghost story, but I never came anywhere close to finishing it. In fact, I tried to write a few novels, but always lost interest before they grew to more than a few pages. I started writing short stories in high school, and that's when I began to take my writing more seriously. The portfolio on my website omits all of the silly things I wrote before 9th grade.

Funny story actually. I enjoyed writing since I was in the 7th grade. Just silly little things from the mind of an adolescent. That year I entered a writing contest. My submission? A Metroid/Star Wars mash up slash fiction where Samus obliterates the entire clone army essentially putting an end the whole saga over the course of about ten pages because that was AWESOME.

Needless to say, I didn't do too much fiction writing after that, and stuck mostly to other creative-type things like drawing and painting and music. But once I got back into college, and was exposed to some more independent writing that was actually GOOD, I got back into it with a little more humour and a little more maturity.

Well I didn't start writing until I was quite a bit older like at age 13. When I was young I always had trouble with English, so much so, as to have to spend four years in our school's ESL (English as a Second Language) program. Which is total crap as we diidnt learn any english in the program, all we did was play BINGO, Go Fish and bake cookies Which would explain why my English didn't get much better.The first time I actually felt good about writing was when my 3rd grade teacher complemented me on a sentence I wrote, and I guess thats it.

I'm sure it was a mighty fine sentence.

I became interested in writing after I became interested in reading.

I actually thought I was going to be a writer for a long time, but I decided otherwise once I started thinking about uni and whatnot. Luckily I still decided to stay in the arts so I wouldn't have to get a real job after I graduate and subsequently feel the need to rip out my eyeballs with my bare hands every thirty-five minutes.

I find myself doing that often working on this site.

Like you, most of my inspiration comes after reading something written really well, and wanting to achieve that same quality for myself.

I was vaguely aware that if I got really good at it, it was something people would buy me drinks for doing.