I think of myself as having started writing in 8th grade. Clearly I wrote before then. That business of my English teacher accusing me of plagiarizing was the year before. But in 8th grade I began writing as a hobby. It started in my English Writing Journal, where one of the things on the list of what we could do was character sketches. Inventing characters was something I had been doing for ages, and this day I decided to do some characters from an imaginary sequel to Return of the Jedi and soon I found myself actually writing that sequel during subsequent English classes, and having so much fun that I soon started writing a sequel to The White Dragon in Science class in the back of my science notebook. Those were the first and only times I ever used other people's universes to write in. All the rest of my stories were entirely original, and before the end of the year was up I had more stories going than subjects, and I had to find somewhere else to put them than in the back of my school notebooks. For the rest of Jr. High and High School I pretty much never went anywhere without a notebook with a story I was working on in it. I usually had about five to six stories going at any one time, that I would switch between as my muse dictated. Unfortunately, I also came up with new stories a rate of roughly two a month, and since the stories were typically long hardly any of these stories were ever finished.
I became serious about being a writer when I dropped out of college for reasons of poor health. Since I could no longer attend school there was now no good reason to not take my writing to the next stage… publication. By that time, I already spent so much time writing, that I'm pretty sure that I already thought of myself as a writer. A writer, after all, is someone who writes. I had (and still have) pages and pages and pages of handwritten manuscripts which proved beyond the shadow of a doubt that I was a writer and had been for some time.