How did Jane Austen become a writer?

Jane Austen was influenced by a number of other literary figures of her time, and by the society in which she lived. Her writing sometimes reflected the earlier writers, sometimes reacted to them, and sometimes was rather mocking of them, though without rancor.

Some of these influences can be readily seen when her work is compared to earlier literature. For example in Jane Austen's novel, Northanger Abbey, Catherine Moreland spends a good deal of time on Ann Radcliffe's novel The Mysteries of Udolpho. A good reading of Radcliffe's novel shows that it is structurally very similar to Austen's. The two have a lot of place settings in common (castles and abbeys), and a lot of action is similar (deceptions and abductions). But where the action in Udolphois meant to be taken seriously, the action in Northanger Abbey is a spoof of it.

Jane Austen copied literary devices she liked, but the ones she did not like in her works were conspicuous by their absence. For example, a fair amount of Udolpho is devoted to descriptions of travels, very similar to the travel logs that were popular before Austen's time. The first trip Catherine Moreland took in Northanger Abbey was covered in a single paragraph with no description of the geography. Her second trip, from Bath to the abbey itself, was described entirely in terms of a conversation that went on in the course of it. Nevertheless, the landscape description based on travel is not entirely rejected; in Pride and Prejudice, it is used to describe Darcy's estate of Pemberly as Lizzy walks through the grounds with the Gardiners. Austen evidentially regarded the device as useful where it had literary reason to exist, but not something to be indulged in gratuitously.

In her novels, Jane Austen described people who were the sorts of people she knew. Sometimes a real person was inserted into one of her novels, such as Knightly's steward in Emma. This man actually existed, and was a personal acquaintance of Jane Austen; she even geve the character the same name. But for the most part, the people she described were fictional representations, perhaps of composites of people she knew. This was a contrasting reaction to the people in novels before her time, which were filled by people who were extraordinary in some way, usually because their stories were so unusual as to be captivating. Jane Austen created literature that did not depend on situations or people who were unusual, but on her literary skill in dealing with normal people with normal lives.