What Started Me Writing? (standard:Creative non-fiction, 1816 words)
Author: G.H. Hadden	Added: Mar 30 2008	Views/Reads: 5073/3534	Story vote: 0.00 (0 votes)
An answer to a Forum queston. I’ve always felt that growing up we all start out with such big dreams and promise. By writing, I manage to hold onto that easily lost promise of youth.

What Started Me Writing? 

By: G.H. Hadden 

Hey there. 

I'm bored again, I guess. 

Well, here I am responding to something I read in the Nicestories.com
forum instead of working on a real story.  But, this is kind of a neat 
question that is deeply personal, and no two answers will ever be the 
same. 

For me, writing is not a therapeutic answer to a brutal life, although
it might be a good stress reliever.  I've been an artistic person for a 
long time, always drawing; mostly dramatic things like sailing ships 
and trains and bustling cityscapes.  Each told a story in it's own 
static way, I suppose.  I remember one particular cityscape in which I 
took the names of all my elementary school classmates and made them 
into business signs and advertising based on the kids' interests and 
personalities.  I sold it to my much older sister by another marriage 
for twenty dollars.  That's a lot of cash when you're in grade five.  I 
think she still has it somewhere—that is, if it didn't burn up when her 
apartment caught fire many years ago.  Must ask her about it sometime. 

You see, writing has always been kind of at the center of me, like an
oil deposit that is slow to be tapped (cliché?  No shit Sherlock!). 

Case and point, ever since a young age I have always been a kind of
wannabe storyteller.  At around nine years old my best friend at the 
time and I used to make up fan plays based on our favorite cartoon 
series ‘G-Force' (A.K.A ‘Battle Of The Planets') and act them out for 
our younger brothers.  As we got older, another friend and I used to 
tell each other stories “only when we were bored.”  Mostly kid 
adventures involving mysteries, and danger.  At that time the only 
books I read outside of school were ‘Encyclopedia Brown' and ‘Choose 
Your Own Adventure'.  We even began writing one story down in a kind of 
collaboration—even playacting out the details, but we never finished 
it.  That all stopped around age twelve, when it got too weird. 

I can remember the first "book" I wrote when I was around ten.  It only
happened because my mom wouldn't let me stay up to watch the end of 
‘The Cassandra Crossing'.  I have always been fascinated with trains, 
so that night in bed I thought up a thousand different endings to the 
movie I couldn't watch the end of.  I eventually wrote my own version 
of ‘The Cassandra Crossing', which followed most of the movie plotline, 
with my own (original?} ending. 

The way I wrote it followed the logic only a kid would think of.  I
folded over a bunch of 8.5 x 11 papers, stapled then together to make a 
book, and then filled the inside with writing.  The length depended on 
how nanny pages I had left to squeeze in an ending!  I wrote it by hand 
in pen, and it had a kid's share of misspellings, crossed out words and 
crooked lines of text.  The cover jacket was my drawing of the train 
rolling along the high steel arch bridge from the movie, with the track 
girders collapsing below the weight of the locomotive.  I guess I 
enjoyed the creativity of it all, because around that same period of 
time I wrote a second hand-written book this way.  The title of that 
one escapes me now, but the plot was invented from a tidbit I saw on 
the CBS Evening News about an American nuclear submarine that was sunk 
somewhere in 1962.  And being a child of the Cold War era, my story 
naturally involved the “Good” Americans VS those “Evil” Soviets, 
ending, of course, with the accidental launch of an American ICBM that 
destroyed Moscow in a giant mushroom cloud!  My kiddy version of “The 
Hunt For Red October” before Tom Clancy stole my idea (OK, maybe 
...NOT!!!).  I still have those relics of the past lying around 
somewhere. 

I was probably the only kid in school that regularly watched the news. 
Consequently, all my badly written and poorly plotted cookie-cutter 
compositions were always set in strange far-away places like 
“Arkensaw”.  Yes, pay attention all you Southerners.  That's how it 
SHOULD be spelt. 

I never wrote much in high school.  Back then my specialty was filthy


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