How should I begin my writing journey? I'm 16 years old, and I have a passion for writing, but how do I start?

The obvious answer is to just start writing. But you need to develop the necessary skills if you want to be any good at it. Assuming that you want to write fiction, it’s important to read a lot. At the risk of stating the obvious, people who are good at sport watch a lot of sport and people who play or compose music listen to a lot of music. The same applies to anyone with aspirations to writing fiction.

I think 16 is a good age to start, because your brain is still developing and you’re open to new ideas. I once taught a creative writing course of my own design and 2 of the class members were 16. The others were all in their 30s and they were all women. While the older class-members interacted more in that they asked questions and generally were less inhibited to express views, the 2 younger members (who were school buddies, as it turned out) just sat there, took a lot of notes, said nothing but produced the best work, which everyone agreed.

The point is that you learn from doing the exercises more than listening to the lectures. The course I ran was 1hr per week over 6 weeks. I spent 1/2hr talking to a white board and the rest of the class with an exercise, plus they did another exercise at home, and at the end of each class I gave them a one-page summary of the ‘lesson’. Obviously, I gave them feedback. It was based on similar lessons I had taken myself (which were actually screenwriting lessons). The thing is that the most essential skills are creating characters (who are not you) and writing believable dialogue. This is the bedrock of fiction-writing. Without those skills you can’t write a story. Plotting requires another set of skills, but dialogue and character development are more fundamental.

Having said all that, you should start writing anyway, if you ‘have a passion for it’, as you say. When you read, you will be attracted to specific genres and authors, and that will inform your own writing, but I would suggest more subliminally than consciously, because that’s what happened to me. I like to pass on a piece of personal advice from Peter Corris (award-winning Australian crime-fiction writer, since passed): ‘Read your favourite authors but find your own voice’. Finding ‘your own voice’ is something that just happens and takes time to develop – it’s not something you can cultivate deliberately in my experience. I write sci-fi, btw, not crime fiction, so the advice is not genre-specific.