Week 1 - How is it I became a writer?

This question makes about as much sense as asking how it is a person became an adult; much as there is no discernible moment when you cease to be a child and are now fully-grown, surely there's no one instant where a switch is pulled and a non-writer becomes a writer? Short of being forced at gunpoint to pen a novel, it seems an unlikely scenario. It might be more fitting to ask about my history regrading writing in general.

In Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing, Margaret Atwood refers to a Japanese novel in which a man copes with a dire situation by talking to himself in his head. This echoes deeply with me, as I recall wandering the playground, acting out scenes from my multitude of doomed novel attempts, all of which were quite suspiciously similar to various media products.

Like many children of the nineties, I was brought up with Roald Dahl books and the various film adaptations of them. The latter in particular I tortured my parents with endlessly. But it was as I approached teendom that I discovered K A Applegate's Animorphs series, chronicling the adventures of shape-shifting adolescents who must battle both aliens and acne across approximately seven thousand books.

While all organisms may have to conform to their genes, I believe the experiences of life play the largest part in moulding our tastes and fears. I was raised on science fiction and videogames, and thus it should surprise nobody that my earliest recollections of writing involved flagrant clones of Pokemon and Stargate. Things just snowballed from there.