Mar 24, 2014 / Beginner

Writing Challenge: Writerly Reflections

We blog for a million different reasons, but in the end, we’re all storytellers. Creative Writing Challenges are here to help you push your writing boundaries and explore new ideas, subjects, and writing styles.

To participate, tag your post with DPchallenge and include a link to this post, to generate a pingback and help others find the challenges. Please make sure your post has been specifically written in response to this challenge. We might just highlight some of our favorites on Freshly Pressed on Friday, and in our quarterly newsletter.

In comic books, an origin story reveals how the superhero(ine) acquired their superpowers. For us as bloggers, writing is one of our superpowers. We know that writing has the power to change the world. Case in point: the recent 2014 Canada Reads debates pitted five books against one another to decide the book with the power to change Canada for the better. (I’m a Canadian book nerd. Sorry!)

Last Friday, photographer Ben gave us a great photo challenge in Reflections. In today’s challenge, you’ll reflect on your origin story and tell us how and why you became a writer.

O Mighty Isis! Or, Superpowers, activate!

Did your love of books start with uncontrollable laughter, begging your mom to read Green Eggs and Ham for the 50th time? Did you want to follow Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy through that wardrobe in The Chronicles of Narnia? Did you wish you could be Meg in A Wrinkle in Time? Those are just some of the books I loved as a kid. I wanted to be able to create my own world in which to escape. Suess, Lewis, and L’Engle were my heroes. I wanted to write amazing books, just like they did. I still do.

Think back: what was the first story or poem you wrote because you wanted to? How old were you? Did you, like me, start writing in “blem,” crooked-edge notepads your printer dad brought home from work because they couldn’t be shipped to the customer?

These are some of the elements of my origin story as a writer. And now, over to you.

It’s your turn

In this challenge, tell us how you fell in love with books and writing. Not sure how to get started? Here are some questions to gently nudge your memory and your muse:

  • Which books did you love growing up? Which poems?
  • Do you remember your first original composition? What was it? How did you feel while writing it?
  • Did you secret your writing away or share it with family and friends?
  • What sort of writing do you enjoy doing best? Fiction? Nonfiction? Creative Nonfiction? Poetry? Memoir? Other?
  • What are your writerly aspirations? Do you write for yourself, or to become published?
  • Why do you write?
  • What keeps you writing?
  • Do you have a daily writing practice? Tell us about it.

You’re welcome to simply answer the questions. Bonus points for weaving your facts into a narrative.

I can’t wait to read your story.

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  1. I love writing random poems and song writings, today I’m studying to write on articles, niche types and memoir. It’s my dream to write a book and I’m in to it

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  8. Wow, why I’m a writer? Yes, I started as an early reader as we had no TV and my siblings were already in school when I was born so I had to “be able to read” to go with them according to my mother. I was writing, for public view, on Daily Kos, but got banned for some unknown reason. No, they never tell you and won’t explain if you’ve even done anything wrong. I don’t know how to pingback on wordpress yet, but I did blog today about the Exxon Valdez as I was President of the Alaska Animal Welfare Society when it happened. One thing I do wish is that folks would comment on my blogs not just like or follow them.

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  14. My writing heroes as a child were Dahl, Lewis and much later Rowling. I think my first love was The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe or George’s Marvelous Medicine. What i loved about those books is that they feature stories where ordinary children enter into a world of fantasy. In Susan, Edmund, Lucy and Peter’s case literally through a wardrobe, and in George’s case he created something that he previously thought could only exist in a sci-fi novel.

    I started writing fairly late, well that’s not technically true, every teenager write an overly dramatic poem full of anxiety and self doubt (because that’s what teenagers are, overly anxious people, where everything is of the utmost importance and they don’t know which direction to take). These poems were terrible.

    Much later I started blogging, this was at the beginning of university and I found myself with a desire to share my experiences, the format (because I’m all technical like that) was that I would take an experience out of my mundane life, usually from walking to the bus from uni or riding on the bus to my house and apply it to a social issue or concept. For example I took my experience of aging 4 years every time the FIFA world cup rolled around, and how it was nice to have an event as the catalyst for reflection, that every four years you are inclined to think ‘the last world cup was in 2010, what was i doing then, what kind of person was I back then?’

    Most recently (upon switching to wordpress to write with a friend on a shared blog) I have started writing less about my own experiences and more about my own opinions.

    Why do I write? I guess it’s good to get my ideas out, it’s nice that people want to read my opinions, and at best if what I write has got them to think. Let’s also not forget that writing is fun.

    Why do I continue to write? I have a muse, it is called life. As long as life continued to be varied and interesting, and if I find it within myself to be motivated to write, then i think I will find plenty of topics enter my noggin for the foreseeable future.

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  27. This was a really great challenge and one I’m glad I took up! It definitely had me diving into a very personal part of myself and one that I don’t frequently talk about even though many who know me, know about my passion for writing without me really ever explaining my own origin story. Thanks for putting this up, Krista! It’s been fun reading everyone else’s submissions too!

    Here is my tale: http://westlifebunny.wordpress.com/2014/03/26/the-artful-process-of-self-discovery/

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  29. Newbie here! Just wrote my first post and then found your blog. Its pretty interesting and if you ask me, I can write for hours but others may or may not find it interesting! 😀

    I can also read comics for countless hours (doesn’t matter if its good or not) book too but it has to be good.

    Again,nice post! 🙂

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