Origins-- Where did your writing dream begin?

Today is the Origins blogfest hosted by DL Hammons, Alex J. Cavanaugh, Katie Mills, and Matthew MacNish. I'm always fascinated by how writers got their start in writing, so I'm joining the fun! (I hope you find it fun, and not completely boring...I'll do my best not to be boring.)

Though I've been writing since I was a wee one, a few moments stick out as driving me along the writing path. In fifth grade, we read the book The Giver by Lois Lowry. That book completely blew my little eleven-year-old mind. It was set in the future. Characters I thought were good did bad things. And it didn't end all tied up and happy! I couldn't get the story, its characters, or the questions it made me ask out of my head.

For the first time in my life, I realized that life itself was full of ambiguity (yeah, I totally used that word as a fifth grader. Or not.). And I decided I wanted to write books just like The Giver, ones that made people think, that made people stay up at night trying to decide what the book meant to them, and wonder what had happened to the characters you loved so much that were left hanging at the end.

So for the next fourteen years, I feverishly wrote short stories, novellas, and one smashtastically horrible novel. I gravitated toward sci fi, and toward stories that addressed questions I had about life. Then, a few months after my son was born, my intuitive hubby gave me a signed Brandon Sanderson book for Christmas, 2009. Better than that, he passed along Brandon's open invitation to attend his science fiction and fantasy writing class.

That class was where I finally put together everything I'd learned from my English lit degree and creative writing classes. I learned what tools I needed to create a story and get it published. It led to my critique group. It led to writing half a novel, trashing it, and writing another in just over a year. Most importantly, it led me to decide that I was going to learn and do everything I could possibly need to write the stories I wanted to tell, and share them with an audience.

And so, two years later, here I am! Still working toward that dream.

So, my friends, where did your writing dream begin? We all started somewhere, and I'd love to know where that somewhere was for you!