I wrote my first story when I was 6 or 7 years old (I think). I only remember the title "Die Innere Verbannung Des Leopold Wundersam" ("The Inner Exile Of Leopold Wondrous") and the tone, which was whiny on behalf of my banished protagonist. I remember getting very frustrated after what felt like a glorious start, because the story petered out or perhaps it never got under way—maybe I was too paralyzed by the gaze of my hero Leopold, whom I imagine now as an exiled Austrian prince. In any case, I never finished it and its beginnings are lost. I retain that sense of frustration after good beginnings and a predilection for odd names. I learnt to read and write early and my first grade teacher used to let me do what I want so I'd like to think that I spent some time in class polishing that story but I'm not sure, I might also have chucked it like so many others.

I love my late-night Mockler question. Thanks for asking.

When I was five years old, I wrote lyrics and melodies. The very first song I can remember was called, "Guitar." It went something like this..."You can play a guitar while sitting on a bench, but you can't play a guitar with a crescent wrench." Maybe it was a monkey wrench. Genius!

Before I could write, I scribbled...I remember one day, when I was very wee, I filled several sheets of paper with "long hand" wavy lines and then "read" my story about a bird to my father (the papers were folded in half into a book), he held me in his lap in the chair by the front window and followed along as my little finger traced the words...I only remember the gist of it having to do with colorful feathers, trees, sky, flight and being free...it was beautiful! (There wasn't a single picture in it because I wanted it to be like a grown up book that was all words.) Who knows if it was ever saved (my mom saved many things), I guess I'll find out once we begin cleaning out their house...mom left us unexpectedly in August, and my poor Da is in a nursing home where he time travels mostly now, and makes up stories about the things he no longer understands in the present...I'll have to ask him if he remembers the story.

I think it was probably a poem on a yellow piece of paper at My Aunt Irene's kitchen table. My mom and dad, my mom's sister, Irene, and her husband would host a card game almost every Friday night. I was too young to play so I got into other things. After the card game Irene would ask if anyone wanted a cheese sandwich and I always did. Maybe then I had a chance to read my poem which because of Irene's influence no doubt began: Roses are red, violets are blue... It was all quite exciting.

Sometime around the 3rd or 4th grade I started drawing and writing my own comic books. For every character in the real comics, I had a counterpart. Instead of The Flash, I had The Dash. Instead of The Doom Patrol, I had Disaster Squad. Back then, you could learn a lot about science from comics. For instance, the Flash could vibrate his atoms so fast that his atoms could slide around and in between the atoms in a solid wall, allowing him to pass through the wall, and there was a villain featured in Doom Patrol comics named Mr. 103, because there were 103 known elements at that time. One of my characters was called Igneous Man. He was a cross between The Thing from the Fantastic 4 and Metamorpho. Igneous man could transform himself, or any part of his body, into any kind of igneous rock, so, for example, he could make his fist into a big rock hammer to smash a giant robot, or if a bad guy was going to shoot someone, Igneous Man could turn into a giant quartz mirror and reflect sunlight into a bad guy's face so he's miss his target. Then I started drawing and writing horror comics, with grisly walking skeletons, killer robots, werewolves, aliens, etc. My mother was worried about my use of gore and violence in these and she threw them all away, hoping I'd forget about them. Made me mad at the time, but I'm over it now. At some point, my father let me use his old, jet-black Royal manual typewriter and I started writing stories without the drawings. I created a James Bond-like spy named Buck Krasby in a short book called "Stormfury" about a bad guy named Ivan Crabbe who was going to seed the clouds with radioactive silver iodide to make it rain deadly rain over the United States. I often wrote silly, nonsensical spoof articles, in the style of Robert Benchley, using non sequiturs and satire. Also, for most of my entire childhood, I made up TV shows and movies, and plotted them out, mostly in my head, from beginning to end. I started writing songs in the mid-60s. They usually had the melody of some song that already existed, with different words.

[i linked to this beautiful thread at alt lit gossip—a new online gossip column founded by metazen founder & editor frank hinton.]

Thanks everyone for commenting on this question. I love reading these. The question came out of an interview series l'm working on. I've been asking the writers I'm interviewing how they came to writing and many go back to their first writing experiences as children which then made me want to change the question to the one I posed here, and I think I will because it gets such rich responses.

Thanks Marcus for sharing this link!

Like Bill, my first writing experiences revolved around superheroes. My grade school had a literary magazine, and at Age 7, I wrote a piece about a superhero dog on a rocket to the moon. When I found it a few years ago, I was shocked to see that my writing style hasn't changed. The dog story is filled with jumps and voices and shifting points of view. I have to remind myself I don't so much have a writing style as my brain is wired to write in a particular way.

My first writing experience was when I was nine or ten years old. I remember sitting on our couch with a typewriter and cutting pieces of loose leaf paper. My dad asked me what I was doing. I replied that I was writing a book and I was cutting the pages to a novel-like size (since books were not printed on 8 1/2 x 11 pages).

I think it was fourth grade. I wrote a story from the point of view of a hamburger. This is the first thing that popped in my memory when I read this question.

I wrote a story in preschool called "The Whight Horse." I thought I was pretty brilliant for knowing how to, um, spell "white" correctly. I remember a girl or boy and her or his horse that had to go away for some reason, probably because it was a magical creature with a life of its own. I wish I could find that story somewhere. After that my next writing memory is years of sitting in a tree in the backyard and writing really sappy poetry about the plants in my father's garden.

Whoops - mistakenly posted same thing twice!

I had a diary with a lock on it, and I remember one time at a sleepover two of my friends convinced me to read to them from it, about all the times I had broken rules. Most of those times involved stealing junk food. My friends loved it, and it was the first time I had shared writing by choice. I think I was about 8 or 9 years old.

Good story, Zola. Those locking diaries always seemed so cool when I was a kid. I even talk about that in my novel, Tamper. Also, I tried to reply to one of your questions about Zazen but could get the "reply" button to come down. The Buzz Lightyear doll is lashed to one of the tiny wooden crosses.

In second grade I was called down to the principal's office. My teacher didn't tell me why I'd been called, but walked me down the hall to talk with him. I actually remember him picking me up from under the arms and holding me up to see a story I'd written, about the adventures of a troll living under a bridge, framed on his wall. Can I count that as my first publication, too? Would sure make it sound like a long if not illustrious career.