Today, when helping three people teach Children’s Moral Education Class to 27 kids in our Youth Month of Service campaign, I started to take pictures. I’m no photographer, but I really enjoy taking weird pictures with the hope that someday I will be able to put good use to them. Among those pictures was the one here.

Seeing a little kid hold a pencil that way took me into my weird mental place where I reflect on the most random things… and I ended up wondering, where do we writers get addicted to writing?

Supposedly, the most influence the world has on our personality happens when we’re children or teenagers. I agree completely. I suppose my desire to write began when I was six, really, and was first exposed to the beauty of the written word. Of course, in those days I had absolutely no idea what Microsoft Word was, so I spent my time writing in notebooks (nowadays I barely remember what a notebook was like, heh)… and when I was six, I wrote my very first poem EVER. It was dedicated to my cat, and it is awesome.

Well, maybe not the best poem in the world, but I still have it at home. I’ll post it when I go there. It was called “My Precious Little Cat”.

I suspect that the lack of a TV in my house was mostly responsible for my addiction to books.

As you’re young it’s really easy to get addicted, and thankfully I got a relatively healthy addiction… books. It started with “The Hobbit”, continued with the “Harry Potter” series and was further intensified by “The Lord of the Rings”. This all happened in a span of 3 years, so by the time I was nine I was pretty crazy. In a good way, of course.

Then Fanfiction came. And what is really, really, really awesome about Fanfiction is that I didn’t even know it had possessed me when I became addicted to it! At some point I’ll talk more about that, but since it’s a pretty huge part of my life there would probably be a lot of things to say, so I’ll wait until later to talk about Fanfiction.

So what gets people into writing? Most probably being exposed to books in a ridiculous amount. (NOTE: By “writing”, I’m mostly referring to fiction kind of writing, not philosophy or science books or anything like that… I barely know anything about that). How do people get exposed to books? Well, that depends. In my case, it was my parents who made the brilliant decision to not have a TV and buy a bunch of books that eventually became food for my soul. We don’t really have a good library around here, and it’s quite a hassle to even get there… so libraries don’t work.

But how do we get other people obsessed with writing? How do we welcome them into our beautiful, imaginative world? I honestly don’t know. Give them a good book, train them in imagination, keep them away from too many movies when they’re toddlers… but in the end, it’s all up to the person themselves. Some people are meant to write, others aren’t at all.

You’re either born for it or you’re not. At least, that’s my point of view. And it’s kind of sad to think that not everybody can explore imaginary places that a writer can through the mind.

I think the flaw in the world is that people perceive writing as actually writing on paper, which isn’t really the heart of being an author. We imagine, we explore, we create, and then we draw a map and some pictures using words… but it’s all open to the reader’s interpretation, making our creation all the more beautiful, because now everybody can put a little piece of themselves in what you’ve done without affecting your own point of view about it. It’s a world that becomes yours. That’s what reading is. And by writing, we create that peace and beauty and adventure.

It’s actually what I call “The closest to knowing what it’s like to be a god”.

And it’s the only way.

Anyway, that was my first blog post, and I hope I didn’t bounce around subjects too much. I’ve never actually held a blog for very long, seeing as most of the my blogposts were comedic back then. I’ll probably do a bit of that too, but I’ll try to be less of a ranter…

So, for any readers or writers out there, how did YOU begin to write? What got you addicted to reading?