Teach Your Children

Encourage the youngsters in your life to write.

Every child is born blessed
with a vivid imagination.
—Walt Disney

I love weird “holidays.” Did you know that today is the final day of National Be Kind to Spiders week? You will want to avoid asking me what I think of spiders because I will go into a whole thing. They’re good for the environment, they help prevent diseases, and anyone who hates flies ought to adore spiders, full stop. But spiders, sadly, have nothing to do with writing, unless I sprain a brain cell trying to work up a metaphor about spinning webs of… no.

Instead, we’ll turn to National Encourage a Young Writer Day, which you still have time to celebrate, because it occurs on April 10. (And really, you can celebrate it every day of the year.)

If you are interested in reading more about this day, I advise you to avoid the first website that likely will pop up in a quick Google search, which has an odd and hilariously abridged “timeline” of this occasion’s development and promotes a writer who today, as I learned in subsequent Googling, is a persona non grata for being xenophobic, racist, and sexist, in addition to being, until the mid-latter half of the 20th century, the far-and-away best-selling children’s book author in history. So it goes.

A better resource might be this one  about National Library Week (hooray!) offering ideas for celebrating National Encourage a Young Writer Day, which falls within that week. Or check out this one, which promotes books by Black authors.

So how can you encourage the young writer in your life?

Suggest she start a journal, or better yet, buy her one. I still remember with great affection my first journal, given to me by a close family friend when I was 8 or 9. (The memory will forever be entwined with my happy childhood family visits to Connie’s Mexico Cafe in north Wichita, because it was there that I was presented with it.) The “journal” was nothing more than a miniature spiral-bound notebook with lined paper, but to me it was the world. (In fact, to this day, I cannot write in the beautiful journals sold in bookstores—they are just too pretty to mess up with random inklings.)

Today’s kids are more worldly than I was (I can say this with certainty, because all kids are more worldly than I was), and it’s a different time. So, the “notebook” you give your kid might be a blog or some other digital format you set up for her. Writing is writing.

Create a young writer’s group. In the first gathering, go over ground rules on how to give and receive feedback in a positive way. (We can talk about that in more detail at another time.) Depending on your young friend’s age, subsequent meetings might or might not include you. But you can always encourage attendance with cookies.

Provide writing prompts for your budding writer. You can find them here,  where prompts are sorted by age group beginning with the very wee, or here, suggesting prompts for journal writing. Among my favorites here (although it’s hard to narrow down from this expansive list):

#15. Suddenly ducks don’t like you. They quack at you and chase you away at the park. How do you get them to like you again?

#16. Oh, no! Suddenly ducks love you and won’t leave you alone! How do you get them to let you be?

#24. Space aliens land and it’s your lucky job to show them around. Where will you take them?

#25. The chicken finally tells you why it crossed the road. What is the secret?

Lure your kids into a family writing project by making them a giant bowl of popcorn and then asking them to use adjectives to describe it. Googling “popcorn adjectives” pulls up lots of pages with advice, lists, and inexpensive packets to get started. Or… simply enjoy your family treat and get everybody’s imagination poppin.

Encourage reading. Curate books for your kids. This age-sorted list offers good options. Ask your child why she likes (or doesn’t like) a story. Encourage her to cite specifics; not “because it’s stupid” but “I didn’t believe a boy that age would talk like that.” Well, then, what would be more believable? you might then say. Take her to the library; in addition to books, you probably can find some variation on live storytelling or other activity around words for young kids.

Suggest different writing styles. If your daughter only wants to write stories about ponies, suggest she try her hand at a graphic novel. If she agonizes slowly over carefully crafted fiction, suggest she find a topic in the news or on a documentary and “report” on it as if she were a journalist on deadline. And then that she do it again in first person, as the victim or the perpetrator of whatever the article is about.

Or she could try her hand at black-out poetry. Or she could free-write for five minutes, just letting her words flow without thinking about what to write—even if those words start out with This is a stupid exercise I hate my mom. Or she could combine the two and free-write poetry using this notebook by Newbury-award winning author Kwame Alexander.

Introduce your fiction-leaning young or teen friend to NaNoWriMo, a fabulous online writing community that began in 1999—when we still called it the World Wide Web!—and has since grown exponentially and includes a robust Young Writers Program. Its basic premise is to encourage writers to get past their hesitations by committing to writing a “novel” (the required word count is closer to a novella) in the month of November. I still have my well-worn paperback, put out by the site’s founder, titled No Plot? No Problem! Plenty of gurus, then and since, have counselled this idea of just jumping in to get it down and worry about fixing it later, but I love this organization’s combination of pragmatism, low frills, and social consciousness. (Learn more about its donations and activism here.)

Don’t stop on April 11. Covid and its subsequent quarantines, cultural trends, economic realities, and political polemics in today’s environment are but a few of contributions to rapid drops in humanities studies and college programs over the past decades. A long article, “The End of the English Major,” in the March 6 issue of The New Yorker (you can read one article for free before they make you pay), cites a complex web—there we go, there’s my spider metaphor—of sometimes contradictory factors at play in our changing academic environment.

The current emphasis on STEM studies, especially for women, is laudable, no question, but it’s see-sawed school studies to extremes, leading to statistics like these, as noted in the article: “From 2012 to 2020 the number of graduated humanities majors at Ohio State’s main campus fell by 46 per cent. Tufts lost nearly 50 per cent of its humanities majors, and Boston University lost 42. Notre Dame ended up with half as many as it started with, while SUNY Albany lost almost three-quarters. Vassar and Bates—standard-bearing liberal-arts colleges—saw their numbers of humanities majors fall by nearly half. In 2018, the University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point briefly considered eliminating 13 majors, including English, history, and philosophy, for want of pupils.”

Whether or not schools ought to shift priorities is a valid argument—after all, it was only by moving away from the campuses attended by the likes of John Updike that women, people of color, and first-generation students have been able to thrive in colleges at all. But it will come as no surprise to anyone reading a newsletter entitled Well Worded that said newsletter’s creator believes that we will always need training in how to articulate clearly and effectively using words.

So don’t stop encouraging the kids in your life to find ways to express themselves in writing, whether through term papers on Albert Einstein or rap poetry or comics about why chickens cross roads. Keep them reading, engaged, and creative. It’s in your own best interest—the birthday cards they send you later on will be a lot more fun to read.

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Lagniappe: Each year on April 10th, National Farm Animals Day focuses attention on the humane care of farm animals. The day also aims to find homes for abandoned and abused farm animals. Perhaps coloring in this cheery drawing will inspire a new masterpiece by your favorite kid writer.