My grandfather was a story teller, my father was a story teller and I also am also a story teller

 This put me in line for doing this too.

I think I started writing as soon as I could doodle and write on a spiral notebook. This was before I learned to type in Junior high school from a course I took one summer. My parents convinced me that since my hand writing wasn't great and since I tended to print long hand mostly instead of writing cursive in all my notes (all the way through grade school, Junior High school and college that taking a typing class after 7th Grade was a good idea.

And of course my first term paper that was required of me in History in my Sophomore year in High School I remember staying up all night to type up my first Term Paper on "the History of the Automobile" which I loved doing the research for (even though I didn't like having to stay up all night typing it up so I could turn it in the next day so i could come home and sleep after not sleeping at all the night before. I think I got an A on that report by the way.

However, typing I found really came to be more and more important and I learned to type faster and faster to where by the time home computers were invented I could type as fast as people could talk mostly.

I began writing likely starting at 6 or 7 or 8 years old. It's hard to know when these things happen because they sort of happen organically in one's life (at least it did for me).

I was an only child so when my cousin who was 16 when I was 8 crashed into a home with friends in his car and broke his neck and died I sort of needed to write because I felt very vulnerable and afraid that someone who was a cousin only 16 had died like that. I didn't know him well because he was in Seattle and I was in Glendale in the Los Angeles Area then going to a grade school there. But, still I felt very alone and vulnerable with this happening and I think I began to start writing more as a way of self comforting myself so I could keep it together psychologically through that event in my life.

So, the story telling for me was first to comfort myself so I could be logical and rational about everything and not fly off the handle emotionally. Boys in the 1950s were expected to be young men by age 4 so there was a lot of pressure on all of us to be as perfect as possible and this could make life very hard because of this. So, even though I was an A student then and my father had been valedictorian of his High school Class I really felt the pressure to succeed in every way and this pressure in some ways was unbearable at the time.

However, I was really good at memorizing and spelling (both are related) and I was always very logical and practical in my life even when I was a boy partly because I had almost died from whooping cough at age 2.

So, this is how I began to be a story teller to survive my life and first I did this for myself so I could go on living and functioning through all the difficulties we all must face in life growing up.