How I started writing

My fiction writing journey started in the second grade. My mother joined a book club at the local supermarket and started bringing home classics like Robinson Crusoe and The Swiss Family Robinson. She encouraged me to read them so I could “better” myself…whatever that might have meant to a second grader. While I loved the cover art on those books, the writing style and language were quite challenging and I soon grew tired of stopping to look up words in a dictionary. Then, one  day my father brought home an old typewriter he found in a junkyard. I was fascinated by its mechanical aspects, and all the cool noises it made, but couldn’t figure out what to do with it. There are only so many times one can type “the quick brown fox jumped over the fence.” Anyway, that machine sparked an idea that led to my first experience in fiction writing…sort of. I’d read a paragraph or two from one of those classics, and then rewrite them, changing words and story to suit myself. I’d type a page or two at a time and leave my work on the kitchen table for my mother to read. Encouraged by motherly praise, this continued for a week or two…until some more interesting activity caught my attention…but that was the start.

By the time I was in high school I was a voracious reader, and my favorite assignment was writing book reports. Writing book reports wasn’t exactly writing fiction…it was more writing about fiction… but it led to my second …sort of…fiction writing experience.

Not all of my friends shared my enthusiasm when it came to these assignments. Some would procrastinate until the day the report was due, not having even opened the book they were supposed to write about. On those occasions when we were free to select our own book, I’d sometimes write the reports for them…in the cafeteria…usually on the day they were due. I’d make up the book’s title, author, plot…everything…over the course of twenty minutes. And they actually received decent grades on them.

After high school my fiction writing and general creativity went on a four decade hiatus, but my appetite for reading fiction grew. The more I read fiction the more I wanted to write it. Ten years ago…fueled by conversations overheard…and characters observed…in a Florida bar, I decided I would write my first novel. Eight years later, with many stops and starts in between, I finished the first draft.

It took much too long to write that first draft, but I was hooked on writing…fascinated with being able to create something from nothing…to take a raw idea and play with time, space, characters and events…and build it into 300 pages that can provide a reader with a few hours of escape and
entertainment.

My second novel was drafted in less than a month…and is currently being revised and improved with the invaluable help of my critique group.

- Joe Demasco

How I started writing

Growing up, I read everything I could get my hands on. I remember when I was in the 6th grade, one afternoon I had to take my books back to the public library and asked the librarian to help me find more books. She took me to the young adults section and handed me several books that I had already read. She seemed startled and reluctantly pointed me to adult mysteries. She told me to come back when I reached high school if I wanted to read romance. When I wasn’t reading I was watching movies. I don’t think a movie came to the theater that I didn’t see. I was so inspired by the characters as I watched them express themselves through gestures and dialogue and I sometimes would think of my favorite story characters and how they move or what they would say if they were on the screen .

One day, the students in my third grade class needed to become better readers and the stories we were reading seemed to lack “substance” so they all said. They hated those stories and complained about the books so badly that one evening I sat down and wrote them a story. I thought I could write a story, since I had read so much. Without formal classes or even reading about how to write, I wrote them a story. We discussed character (they identified some things that were not in the story) plot (they also helped me with that), setting, the main idea, details and they just wanted to continue talking about the poor boy who had lost his best friend. When I tried to go back to the stories that the curriculum provided, they told me again that they didn’t want to read those. So, I had to come up with more stories. Thus began my dabbling into the career of writing.

I continued to read, this time focusing on children’s chapter books and decided to take a class at night to learn how the writers did these things. I wanted to know how they came up with ideas, how to choose vocabulary, which I discovered was extremely important, and, how many pages would make a good story. After a while, I got brave and decided to take the techniques about writing for children that I was now learning and shape them into a story. I couldn’t believe that I had written a story and to me it seemed like a good one. But, writing one story wouldn’t make me a writer so, I wrote another story for children 3rd grade and above.

I love creating characters. Sometimes I see my characters as real people having real experiences. One day I found myself referring to a character in my second novel when I was conversing with a friend. When that happened, I realized that I wanted to try my hand at writing screen plays. Again, I bought books, took classes and went to Hollywood to several Selling to Hollywood conferences and to several screenwriting conferences in New York. There, I learned how to develop a good character, which I found is extremely important in screen writing. It also changed the way I see movies. I wrote five screen plays and sent the fifth one out, hoping for an option. I had mild success with it, and because of that, decided to add novel writing to my list. To date, I have written three novels and have also written several short stories. But I must continue to improve. In writing, there is always something to improve and you improve whether you want to or not as long as you’re writing.

-Judy Kelly

What inspired me to start writing?

I was intrigued by the language in the books that I read. As a youngster, I realized that an artful arrangement of words on the page conveyed a meaning beyond the stories they were used to tell, if that makes any sense.

For example, a passage in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped seemed to resonate with me. It’s in the first chapter as the main character, Davie, who has been orphaned, leaves his hometown and is asked by Mr. Campbell, the minister of Essendean, if he were sorry to be leaving. Davie replies, “Why, sir, if I knew where I was going, or what was likely to become of me, I would tell you candidly. Essendean is a good place indeed, and I have been very happy there; but then I have never been anywhere else.”
Stevenson could have written that verbal exchange in any number of ways, but he arranged those words in that particular order to very good affect. And, a few lines later, Davie, the narrator, remarks that “My heart was beating hard at this great prospect now suddenly opening before a lad of seventeen years of age.”

To my mind, there could not be a better invitation than that for the reader to experience the adventurous tale that unfolded on the pages of Stevenson’s book.

So, as I continued to read throughout my life, I became more and more intrigued by how and why various writers arranged the words the way they did — like fitting the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle together just the right way to form a picture. And I wanted to be able to do that myself.

To my delight, I discovered early on that I had a certain facility with words and, along with a good imagination and encouragement from family and some of my teachers, I decided to become a writer. That eventually led me to a career in journalism and non-fiction writing. All the while I have continued to write poetry and fiction and enjoy the challenge and satisfaction that brings. It’s fun as all get-out.

-Dave Autry