My First "Published" Story and Earliest Writing Influence 

Thanks for sharing your writing journey. Loved the snake story. Looking forward to your next video.

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We had a Young Author's Day every year in grade school where everyone wrote their own picture book. You would group up with students from other classes in your grade, go to another teacher's classroom, read the book to your small group, and show them the pictures. The office would bind them similarly to how your book looked. I really enjoyed those days; they are some of my best memories from grade school. I invented a superhero that would become the subject of my Young Author's Day stories throughout grade school, and really kept me interested in creative writing until I got to high school. I wish schools still did this. I am in education myself, teaching high school, and the emphasis on creative writing and even the simple act of sharing your writing is greatly diminished. Loving your work on this channel so far. Keep going!

Thank you for sharing this. It was a nice story, both the one you wrote as a child and the one you told about your life. To answer your final question, I'm not much of a writer, never really been, though I was always getting very good grades quite effortlessly in the exercise. I have a good imagination, which might explain the grades, but words don't really speak to me so I struggle to put in the work. This is the challenge of being a purely visual storyteller. The more I learn about writing, the more I feel my goal of writing a feature film will either require a lot of time, or a lot of help. We'll see! By the way, it's nice to see your subscriber count grow up. Looking forward to when you'll be a RU-vid powerhouse. Don't let it go to your head though! haha

Excellent video, thank you for sharing!

this is very inspiring. I didn't have the luxury of being read to, it just wasn't in our cultural practices at the time. I couldn't read until I started school and discovered comic books! From there my pre to teenage years were filled with very old books I discovered from my dad's collection (books I'll never remember their titles and authors...except one: Tarzan!) Poetry was a big part of that collection and has influenced how I approach all reading and writing. I have never written anything worth publishing, though.

Loved the story!

Thanks for the great personal stories! It is indeed useful to be reminded that creative agents are as human as everyone else, and that everyone can be a creative agent of some sort to some degree (indeed, I believe we all are). My first published work was a poem, that I composed in fifth grade (as a writing assignment), and that my teacher actually submitted to the local paper (without my knowing), and was actually printed by them. It was a composition imagining the destruction of Pompeii by Mount Vesuvius. I no longer have a copy of the poem, but I remember I was careful to make the lines rhyme. I also submitted some creative writing for my high-school literary journal, and can remember one story that was thereby printed, a horror story about the unusual punishment that some dastardly parents meted to their disobedient children. I think I might have been (subconsciously) influenced by Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery", which we were studying at around that time. The story was illustrated, without any consultation of me, by a budding artist on the journal's staff, and I remember disliking the drawing, finding it too blatant. I loved reading from an early age, and was aided by my parents being avid readers themselves, with books always to be found in our home. My earliest literary passions included Lewis Carroll's Alice books and L. Frank Baum's Oz books, and I was also fond of Roald Dahl's 'Charlie and the Chocolate Factory' and Andrew Lang's fairy-tale books of many colors. Though I loved nursery rhymes as a wee child, I largely lost a taste for poetry in my later childhood (making the Pompeii poem all the more an outlier in my history), and for a long time had little patience for this literary form that seemed so deliberately obscure and rarefied. The irony is that I eventually came to value poetry even more highly than prose as a vehicle for creative writing, as I'm very interested in form and style, and in poetry every single word and detail matters. Unfortunately, I'm just not a very adroit poet, and am in awe of those who have managed to achieve lasting works of beauty and power in that medium. Some of my favorite poets include John Keats, Emily Dickinson, William Butler Yeats, and Elizabeth Bishop. Whenever I seriously strive to write creatively, my overarching goal is to compose something beautiful, as I think there is nothing more important for an artist to do than to leave something of beauty in a world so constantly in need of its comfort.

I wish I had learned the lesson that books ‘didn’t fall from the sky’ when I was young. I may have begun writing much earlier than I did. Sometime in the late seventies when I was in elementary school, I was given a box set three books by E.B. White - Charlotte’s Web, Stuart Little and The Trumpet of the Swan. I tore through these books with such glee, then began them over again. They truly started my love of reading. I just didn’t realize until much later that I, perhaps, could also produce one of these amazing things called ‘books’.

How are you doing mr Luke . Iam Arabic lady subscriber to several British and American RU-vid channels. We are as foreigners subscribers as overseas students want to increase our cultural level , improve our English language as well and literature lovers. Thank you for your wonderful cultural educational channel. I hope I can learn a lot from your knowledge. Honestly Iam always keeping notebooks and pens beside me looking for new vocabularies and new information because Iam not native speaker .

I looked up for definition of creative writing is form of writing that encompasses number of different genres and styles outside more formal scope of technical writing or academic writing. Creative writing focuses on elements such as characters development, narrative, plot , structure with imagination and story . There are four forms of creative writing are fiction, nonfiction, poetry , screenwriting . Skills of creative writing are degree , planning and research, ability to work independently, presentation and negotiation. Creative writing encourages us to expand our vocabularies as explore new ways of expressing ourselves. Most important part of creative writing is character. Four parts of creative writing are characters , plot , setting, tension . Iam so sorry to be little long but reading and writing both are great ways to improve our English as none native speakers. Best wishes for you your dearest ones . Happy Halloween in advance.

I can't help but cringe at what I wrote back when I was in school. I suppose that's a sign of growth. Though it does lead me to a question: do you ever find yourself feeling a passion for rewriting any of your older works? I tend to get that urge from the not-so-great writing of others than anything I've written in the past (not counting unfinished outlines and drafts that I debate finishing).

You were supposed to be taking out the trash, trustee. Not doing a video in the warden's office. Also, get out of the warden's work out clothes and back into your orange jumpsuit.