I actually had a similar experience as a kid reading fan fiction for the Legend of Zelda games. I wanted to share the fan fiction I was reading with friends at school, but my family's "internet computer" had no printer, and our "printer computer" (an old Laser 486) had no internet, so I had no way of printing the stories I found on the internet.
Had I understood the concept of saving web pages (or even copy and pasting text), I could have stored the stories I wanted to share as plaintext files, put them on a floppy disk, and then transferred them to the Laser 486 to print. The idea that the text could be transferred from one machine to the other didn't really register with me, so what I did instead was to read Zelda fanfic online, then rush upstairs to the other computer with enough of the story still fresh in my head and re-construct the stories as best I could from memory. Usually, I tried to imitate the style and structure of the original fanfiction, but sometimes I would inject my own personal style or intentionally change details in places where I felt like my own imagination could improve over what I recalled of the original story. The longer I did this, the more I found myself re-writing others' stories rather than aiming to simply reproduce them, sometimes to the point where my "imitation" could barely be distinguished as an attempt to copy.
I started writing fiction professionally in my 20's (which I'd consider to be a fairly young age), and I think a big part of what allowed me to go pro so young is that under the Malcolm Gladwell "10,000 hours of practice" model I ended up getting most of my practice in pretty early (at the time not even acting with the intention of practicing fiction writing), so perhaps my inability to copy and paste text was ultimately responsible for kicking off my career as a storyteller. In retrospect, re-writing fan fiction was the modern equivalent of apocrypha (non-canon stories) repeated and passed down through oral tradition.
Had I understood the concept of saving web pages (or even copy and pasting text), I could have stored the stories I wanted to share as plaintext files, put them on a floppy disk, and then transferred them to the Laser 486 to print. The idea that the text could be transferred from one machine to the other didn't really register with me, so what I did instead was to read Zelda fanfic online, then rush upstairs to the other computer with enough of the story still fresh in my head and re-construct the stories as best I could from memory. Usually, I tried to imitate the style and structure of the original fanfiction, but sometimes I would inject my own personal style or intentionally change details in places where I felt like my own imagination could improve over what I recalled of the original story. The longer I did this, the more I found myself re-writing others' stories rather than aiming to simply reproduce them, sometimes to the point where my "imitation" could barely be distinguished as an attempt to copy.
I started writing fiction professionally in my 20's (which I'd consider to be a fairly young age), and I think a big part of what allowed me to go pro so young is that under the Malcolm Gladwell "10,000 hours of practice" model I ended up getting most of my practice in pretty early (at the time not even acting with the intention of practicing fiction writing), so perhaps my inability to copy and paste text was ultimately responsible for kicking off my career as a storyteller. In retrospect, re-writing fan fiction was the modern equivalent of apocrypha (non-canon stories) repeated and passed down through oral tradition.