What made you start writing stories? How old were you when you started?

[E. K. Seaver]

I know I’m late to this, but I started writing stories when I was… five? The first story I have recorded is from 2009, but I know I started writing before then. The one I’ve got was a one-page story I wrote for my dad for Christmas. (Also- where did the stereotype that children who read a lot were good spellers come from? Somehow I missed that bandwagon.)

Thus, I present to you–

Cristl the Cristmas Unacorn

(for my daddy mary critmae)

Once upno a time Santa was packing his slaigh for litle boys and girls he had a cristal and as he flew the wind keptbl0wing harder and harder in till his cristal blow off!!! Win it flow off the raindeere could not fly so out of the sky thay fell the raindeere were hert and Santa had a cucshin right away thay calld Cristl she came right away in time to save Cristmas and Santa so Evry Cristmas Eve Crastl rides bside Santa THE END

Isn’t that so beautiful? XD I don’t know why I wrote about Santa. I didn’t even believe in Santa as a child. :’D

The pen is mightier than the sword, but in a duel, I'm taking the sword.
ekseaver.wordpress.com

[Anonymous]

@e-k-seaver Wow. I feel you, girl. Technically, I was writing at five on my mom’s computer, and since I still, to this day, cannot properly type (I think I’ve finally made it somewhere decent in the spelling/punctuation realm 😉), I doubt anything I’d done was any less beautiful than yours! 🤣

I’ve been writing along and along, since I was five, I guess. A couple drafts (aka, two sentences) on Notepad (that little Windows accessory no one ever uses), about princesses…I think. Of course, our PC crashed not long after that, actually, so all of that gorgeous prose has been lost in cyberspace for ten years. After that, I tried my hand at writing Barbie picture books, complete with Mattel sticker illustrations. Believe it or not, I hated writing so much that I would scribble the words–and this was when I was eight–then make it up as I read.

My first actual in-a-notebook-in-somewhat-legible-script-that-was-intended-to-become-a-real-book-one-day book was a “romantic mystery” based off of a situation at church, where my sister thought one of the boys in her Sunday School class liked her. Names were changed for protection, of course, but I played the big-sister detective and she the victim of notes and teasing. It lasted for, oh, a chapter, when I was about nine years old. I think *digs around in a box FULL of old papers and drawings and notebooks* I might *gulps in a breath of air before diving back into box* can find *shakes head while continuing to shuffle through paper* the original manuscript… *rises, choking on dust bunnies* Nope.

After that, it was a story about four thirteen-year-old spy girls, which lasted almost two whole chapters! Then, when I finally found out that–what? I could actually write words to become big, thick books and, like, publish them one day, I dove in headfirst to write a romantic western, called “Finding Love on Horseback,” that I still have in my possession to this day, along with several others I started about the same time.

At first, it was mostly for enjoyment (back in the days of Barbie books), then it became a calling as well as a passion, something I knew I wanted to pursue one day (or today, but I hadn’t though I’d make it this far five years ago–or even two years ago, when I started working on my debut novel, Held Captive).

 

Random side note: I’m not the only one who didn’t believe in Santa??!! Ha! There’s hope, after all! May I ask why?

 

And, whoa, this is LONG!

[E. K. Seaver]

@gracie-j

Nope, never believed in Santa. My dad didn’t either, and he didn’t want his kids to. Mom, on the other hand, didn’t want to do it because she didn’t want her kids to ever feel like she had lied to them… but personally I also think she did it as a little act of rebellion from her parents, who had so tightly held on to that tradition that she, as a child, believed in Santa up through 6th grade. XD TBH she so heavily engrained into me not to talk about it that, like, whenever the topic is brought up in the group of my (highschool-college-aged) friends, I freak out and worry I’m going to spoil it for someone before remembering that everyone’s out of that phase. XD

 

I wrote my first “real” book (the qualification being that it’s typed on a computer) over a span of two years and got 15,000 words.

I wrote my first novel over a span of six months and got 60,000 words.

The pen is mightier than the sword, but in a duel, I'm taking the sword.
ekseaver.wordpress.com

[Anonymous]

🤣 So, my siblings and I have never believed in Santa, and for practically the same reasons! I just thank God I’ve never had to worry about spoiling it for anyone, since that’s never really come up in a conversation before–which I feel would just be really awkward.

My first try at a “real” book was written over the span of maybe two months, and I ended up churning out about 9,300 words. (Now that I’ve added that up, I’m surprised at how many that was.) When I gave up on that one, I started another and nearly finished it after about two-to-three months as well, which came out at 14,500 words. (I’m now able to write twice that much in two weeks, thank goodness.) Then I finished my first (albeit forever unpublished) novel at 43,300 words within about a year. I almost finished the sequel to that one before I ditched that story altogether.

I wrote my debut novel in six months as well, but it came out at a little over 74,000 words. The sequel, which took the same amount of time, was 25,000 words longer.

Now that I’m going back, I wrote a lot more than I thought. Wow.

[Author]

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