I’ve been writing for as long as I can remember knowing how to write. My earliest memories of writing go back to my primary school “once upon a time, there was tortoise and a bird,” kind of stories.

I remember finding it very difficult to write those stories back then and I don’t think they even made sense when I did, but I remember learning three things that really laid the foundation for my writing now:

1). Stories are tools for teaching and not just entertainment.

2). People like stories and so they learn better from/with them.

3). Thinking up a story is very different from writing it down.

I guess that fuelled my desire to learn how to write and, because I’ve always loved reading, I had access to other people’s thoughts expressed in a way I found “catchy”. So I did the smartest thing I could think of and I pretty much just learnt from them.

After a considerable amount of effort on my part, my writing blossomed. I had to work on my spelling and grammar, punctuation and figures of speech, as well as handwriting back then because I was born in the age before technology took over the world.

I started off by writing a lot of poetry (some of which are included in my book, Events to emotions) back in high school.

My high school friends and I used to write short stories to entertain our peers and generally pass the time. I found that all the things I read, coupled with my hyperactive imagination, allowed me to build vast worlds and create complex stories in my mind and, because I was exposed to good writing through the books I read, it wasn’t all that difficult for me to put my thoughts on paper.

Much like anything else, in developing my individual writing style, I have found that I have been, and am still being, influenced a lot by the people I read. When one spends a lot of time with someone, they start to pick up the persons mannerisms. So it is with reading. The more one reads the works of a certain author, the more one begins to express their thoughts in a similar fashion.

And that’s the long version of how I started writing. I made an effort to learn from those who wrote the books I loved to read.