The most important thing that young writers can do to develop their skills is write, write, and write some more.
In conjunction with writing, young writers should read great writing: fiction, nonfiction, poetry, jokes, text messages…. The form doesn’t actually matter. The more great writing they read, the more the rhythm of language will take root in their heads.
But finally, young writers can be really inspired by books about writing and reading. Below are a few of my favorites for young writers of a variety of ages.
The two adult writers of this book address kid writers as equals: fellow writers struggling to find out what they want to say and to say it well. My students love the advice in this book and they love the “I Dare You” prompts sprinkled throughout.
This is a book full of fun, inspiring prompts. My students love it. But I do ask them not to actually rip the pages…
Zen in the Art of Writing: Essays on Creativity
Ray Bradbury was probably the single most inspiring writer to me as a young writer. I didn’t discover this book until I was looking for a good book on writing for my more advanced writing students. This is not for novice writers or readers, and at times Bradbury can be a bit bawdy. (One of the pieces is entitled “Drunk, and in charge of a bicycle”!) But my advanced students love it as much as I do. It would be a great one to read along with reading the books that Bradbury references in his essays.
It often takes a whole semester before students realize what all these stories have in common: they are all about books and reading in one way or another. There aren’t many contemporary short story collections for kids that don’t focus on “classic” stories. Although I love the great writers of the past (see Little Worlds below), some kids just aren’t ready to read past the antiquated language and into a world that doesn’t connect well with theirs. The situations and characters in Shelf Life are accessible and inspiring.
There aren’t a lot of great collections of classic stories for kids. I have to say, most of these stories require a high school reading level. I would also venture to say that most middle schoolers wouldn’t have the depth of understanding needed to really “get” these stories. For that reason, I always have to apologize about the book’s title to my teen readers, who may think that it’s a book for “little kids.” But of course, few of the stories in this collection were actually written for kids. They include many of the greatest short stories that have inspired writers for generations.
One of the consistent misunderstandings I see amongst parents, other teachers, and even students themselves is how working on creative writing skills translates to improved skills in “serious” or academic writing. Most people seem to consider creative writing “extra-curricular” and therefore not academically important.
However, research has proven many benefits of “extracurricular” study, such as the link between musical study and improved math skills. Similarly, creative writing embeds important skill-building exercises like the medicine in Mary Poppins’s “spoonful of sugar.” Here are some of those lessons.
1. Any writing is good writing
Writing is a ‘practice.’ No matter what the task, whether it’s texting with friends or writing a poem, using words develops the brain just like lifting weights develops muscles. Exercise is a great metaphor because it’s something that many people detest just the way people detest writing. The common advice you see about getting more exercise applies to writing: find a way to make it social, do it in a location that you enjoy, chart your progress, reward yourself.
Creative writing is something that is attractive to many kids in part because of its social character. No one is going to want to read your book report on “Little House on the Prairie” (apologies to my third-grade teacher), but there’s an audience for your Pokemon fan fiction or your poem about autumn. And creative writing shows progress in a pleasurable way. My students have chosen to write everything from an encyclopedic description of sports cars to a NaNoWriMo dystopian novel.
2. Creative writing uses the same skills as academic writing
Good creative writing features specific, appropriate word choice. Good academic writing features specific, appropriate word choice.
Good creative writing features strong, varied sentences, clearly written. Good academic writing features strong, varied sentences, clearly written.
Good creative writing is well-organized and offers the right amount of information to lead the reader through a story. Good academic writing is well-organized and offers the right amount of information to lead the reader through an argument.
Good creative writing makes the writer’s world come alive in the reader’s brain. Good academic writing makes the writer’s argument come alive in the reader’s brain.
But while many students resist “working” on their writing, they are very open to developing their creative writing skills.
3. Creative writing opens the door
Pretty much every reluctant writer I’ve ever worked with has come to me after someone has “taught” them to write. Usually that someone thought that kids need to learn to write the way they learn to make a cake: Give them a recipe, tell them to follow the rules, expect them to enjoy the product.
But that’s not how writing works. For most people, writing isn’t inherently pleasurable, and introducing it as a bunch of rules to be followed to produce a bad-tasting result doesn’t work. It’s like asking a kid to make a cake out of overcooked broccoli—why bother following the recipe if no one is going to enjoy the product?
When kids are excited to share their work, that excitement translates to a permanent, solid base of enthusiasm that fuels enthusiasm for future academic writing.
Forget the work—let’s “play”!
Recently, one of my online creative writing students expressed great pleasure at the end of class for having spent an hour “not learning anything.” I let it slide, happy that he couldn’t see me at my desk, laughing at the success of my pedagogic deception. My students are learning—they just don’t know it.
This post continues the discussion of teaching writing that I started with Healthy Writing Habits for Children. In that post, I discussed how to encourage younger children to write freely and comfortably by not stressing what is wrong with their writing. In this post, I’ll address the topic that parents are so often concerned with: preparing children for formal writing.
The most natural formal writing to approach with kids is letter-writing, both digital and physical.
First off, let’s admit it: Formal writing doesn’t yell out “this is fun” to most kids. In fact, teaching kids formal writing too early is often what makes them hate writing in general. Traditional schools excel at making kids hate writing, and the more they force writing lessons on students, the more students end up hating writing. Then they justify moving formal writing lessons even earlier, because so many students end up poor writers in high school.
One of the things that many people notice about homeschooled kids, though, is that excepting students with a specific disability, homeschoolers often end up being proficient writers with little instruction.
The less instruction the better
Is this really true? Should we stop teaching kids how to write? Certainly, this isn’t what I advocate. But I do believe that formal writing lessons need to be left until formal writing is a reality in students’ lives, not just something that school makes them do. This doesn’t mean that kids shouldn’t be learning to write, but they should be doing it in the developmentally appropriate ways:
Read a lot of great writing
Write a lot about things they are interested in
Value the creation of narrative in any medium—audio, video, illustration, etc.
Don’t jump into formal writing too soon
How do you know a student is ready to approach formal writing? The answer is pretty simple: When the student’s life demands it.
The first formal writing kids do are things like letters to Grandma, Santa, or the Tooth Fairy. This formal writing is perfectly in line with a young child’s life. The next formal writing a child might want to do is start a blog or newsletter about something the child is passionate about. Again, this is formal writing but it draws from a need within the child.
As students progress, they might have to do small amounts of formal writing such as:
send an email asking for information about a program
send an email to a teacher about a class assignment
write a letter to the editor of the local newspaper on an issue they’re passionate about
Parents can encourage students no matter how young to write these communications themselves, with some parental guidance.
Bridging the chasm
But aren’t these simple types of formal writing terribly far from a formal essay? Well, not really. As students mature, they start to see the need to communicate as part of their education and/or work. You don’t have to teach students the execrable 5-paragraph essay format in order for them to understand how to write.
Students go through the analytical process anytime they ask for a raise in their allowance or permission to get a new pet:
break the issue into its basic parts
analyze it
offer supporting information
argue against common objections
present the conclusion
Although the gap between the daily writing that your student does and formal writing may seem wide, kids are learning a lot that you will be able to draw on once they approach formal writing.
A child who is not afraid of writing will start developing formal writing skills as a matter of necessity, as long as the parents and teachers are encouraging and supportive. The first few times my son had to send an email for a formal purpose, I would ask him to send me a draft first. We’d go over it, then he’d rewrite and send. After that, he stopped asking for help with emails.
The first time he had to write something longer than an email for a serious purpose, it was simply second nature to him that he’d write out his ideas, we’d look at it together and discuss it, he’d edit and send it.
Writing assignments encourage the worst writing
The times I’ve had real trouble getting my son to write were the times that I simply assigned something to be written for me, to prove that he could do something. And each time I’ve done that, I’ve regretted it. His formal writing that had real purpose was so much more inspired than anything I ever assigned him.
There comes that day…
Eventually, as students recognize the need for formal writing in their lives, they will be willing to tackle the challenge.
What day is that? When your teen is mature enough to realize the point of formal writing without being told. The other day my son casually said to me, “You never read the essay I wrote for history class, did you?” Then he handed it to me. It was a beautifully written, college-level piece of writing about the history of immigration to the US. Yes, it was assigned writing, but he found a topic of interest to him, broke it apart and found supporting documentation, and presented it to his teacher because it was expected of him in the class he was taking.
The process he went through uses what I see as the three developmental stages in developing formal writing skills:
Developmental stage 1: Write about topics of interest and learn to love communication
Developmental stage 2: Learn to analyze, support, and argue an issue so that you can interact with the world
Developmental stage 3: Learn that formal writing has a real, immediate purpose in your life
Not every student is going to be an inspired, enthusiastic writer. But every student who can learn to communicate effectively can learn to do it in textual form. Our biggest job as homeschooling parents is not to make them hate it before they even start to learn.
Note: I have been teaching a teen literature circle and have been thinking a lot about why it’s so hard for some teens to write when they have such wonderful and wise things to say in our workshops. Here is the first piece of advice that I want my students to think about.
When teachers talk to each other about teaching writing, they often talk about “process over product.” Most teachers try to instill this idea through how they teach. I think that teens, who often focus on the product, can improve their writing experience by rethinking their mindset and intentionally focusing on process over product while they write.
What are process and product?
When we are little kids, process is everything. What is process? It’s getting our hands all sticky and gooey in fingerpaint and the smooth feeling of spreading the paint on paper. Process is telling our parent a long, imaginative story that we made up, which is fun to tell but actually has no point at all. Process is getting on a bike, going a few meters, tipping over, crashing, getting up, and then doing it all over again. Process is grabbing Dad’s camera and taking one hundred and fifty-six photos of the mound of dirt we just made.
When we become adults, product seems to become everything. Product is getting an A in a tough physics class in college. Product is getting the diploma and the job or the promotion. Product is handing in that research we had to do by Thursday. Product is winning an award, meeting a goal, or earning a title.
Our culture teaches us that product is supremely important—more important than anything else. We read about a musician’s award, an actor’s pay, a businessperson’s stock holdings, and a politician’s victory as if the end-product is the most important thing. But is it?
Which is more important, process or product?
My process includes a cup of tea, Trident gum, Altoids, and a bowl of nuts (now empty).
Consider a woman who was raised to believe that her self-worth is equivalent to how much money she earns. Because she believes this, she chooses to study a major in college that will lead to a high-paying job. This isn’t the major she’s interested in, but she reasons that this isn’t important because the major she’s interested in doesn’t lead to a high-paying job. After college, she’d like to move to a quiet, rural setting, but she knows that her industry is based in a big city, and that’s where she will find success. So she moves to the big city. She gets a great job, works hard, gets promotions, and soon is earning large amounts of money.
If you ask this woman if she has achieved success—the product she sought—she’d probably say yes. But did she enjoy the process? Is she now a happy, fulfilled person? Of course not. Though she has achieved a product that looks great, in the process she lost everything she loved and was interested in.
Imagine next an actor who is at the top of his game. His recent movies have been blockbusters. The movie he’s just about to work on is with a great director. Imagine he turns up for the first day of shooting with one thing on his mind: Will this be a successful movie, too? Will it make a lot of money? The actor ignores everything that has made his acting great—the process—and is focusing only on the end product.
Will the actor be successful this time around? Will he look like he is in character, or will he look like he’s thinking about whether this movie will be another blockbuster? Obviously, in focusing on product, the actor will lose what he had in his previous movies. (This in fact seems to happen quite often in Hollywood!) He will seem like he’s not really engaged with the part. He will appear as if the process doesn’t matter to him. And his product will therefore suffer.
One final thought experiment: Imagine you are a concert pianist and are about to perform a wonderful but difficult piece that you have spent months preparing. You also know that a very influential critic will be in the audience, and this may make or break your career. You know that your best performances have always been ones in which you relaxed into the music—the process of playing—but on this night, all you can think of is whether your right hand is playing too loudly, whether the critic would notice that you missed a note, and what you will do if you get a bad review in tomorrow’s paper.
Your process, clearly, is misery. And your product? You may be lucky and find that no one noticed how your performance—your product—suffered. But most likely the audience will go away wondering why everyone recommended that they go hear that stiff, self-conscious pianist.
What do teens learning to write have to do with the businesswoman, the actor, and the pianist?
When we hear about successful adults, there is mostly a focus on product. We hear about the businessperson’s millions of dollars, the athlete’s awards, and our neighbor’s new job. When we see a picture on the cover of a magazine, we see the product, not the process of making the subject of the photo look perfect. When we read about someone’s achievements, they look inevitable, as if the award at the other end had always been there waiting.
But if we focus on process rather than product when we study successful adults, we would see that their product was not, in fact, inevitable. Life led them through twists and turns they could not have predicted. And this is exactly like the process of writing.
Rule #1: Don’t start with your product in mind
When you ask a teen who is sitting down to write an essay for her English class what she’s doing, she might answer
“Trying to get to the end of this dumb essay”
or
“Working really hard because I want an A in this class”
or
“Worrying about whether I can actually write down all the ideas I have.”
In all three cases, by focusing on product she’s inhibiting herself right from the start. This is a big part of what people call “writer’s block.”
Rule #2: Do start with a brain dump
There are many ways to do brain dumps, so I’m using a neutral term to include them all. Writing teachers usually swear that the one they like is the best, but I’d say the best is whatever works for you. I once had a student who would write sentences on the subject she was writing about on individual index cards. Then she’d lay them out in front of herself and shuffle them around. Personally, this approach seemed alien to me, but I was glad she’d found it.
Maybe your brain dump will be one of these:
Word associations scribbled on a large piece of paper
Various thoughts dictated into a recording device
Doodles and cartoons on the subject
An outline
A brainstorming session with a fellow student
Imagining that you are being interviewed about the topic and typing out your responses
There are countless ways you can dump what you know into some sort of “hard” form. The important part of it is that you get it out of your head and into some external form that you can look at or listen to.
Rule #3: Figure out what you know and don’t know
If you’re writing about something you really care about, you might just need to look up a few facts and figures. So you can make some notes:
How many pounds of plastic do Americans throw away each year?
Was it Henry VII or Henry VIII who had six wives?
What year was it that our family went on that trip to Costa Rica?
If you’re writing about something you don’t care as much about (and yes, that happens sometimes), you’ll find that you have more blanks to fill in. But again, don’t focus on the blanks so much as the process of filling them in. Just be confident that you’ll figure it out in the end and stop worrying about it!
Rule #4: Write a roadmap
Some of you are outline people. You really like using the Roman numerals and nesting all your individual ideas. Go ahead and do that.
Some of you are graphic types and you might just want to start putting color-coded circles around each idea you wrote down and grouping them together. Go ahead and do that.
You may even have a teacher who requires you to use a specific method. Go ahead and do that to please your teacher (if you want to), then go back and do it your own way because that’s the process that appeals to you. (In my experience, most teachers will accept deviation from their instructions if the student shows that it was a successful alternative process for them.)
In any case, this is where you figure out what all your ideas amount to. It’s actually a fun process if you let it be, and part of letting it be fun is continuing to ignore the product. Consider again working with a partner or an imagined partner here. Talking about what you might want to write can be very helpful. Have your partner take notes, or do it in a text chat so that you have all your ideas typed out already, or record it.
Rule #5: You don’t know to know where you’re going when you write
Lots of people think that professional writers spit out polished prose like water out of a faucet. They don’t. They struggle and strain just like anyone else. The difference is that most of them actually enjoy it. They come to like the process of figuring out what they want to say, and how they want to say it. Even if you don’t become a professional writer, your writing will improve if you view the task as enjoying the process, not as creating a product.
At this point, lots of different things could happen:
some of you are going to feel comfortable following your roadmap
some of you are going to veer off of your map and find out you are writing about something else altogether
some of you are going to skip around and write disjointed pieces
All of these things are fine. All of these approaches are part of your process.
Rule #6: Nothing you write is set in stone
Finally, remember that even more now than when I was a kid, your writing is temporary. You can erase anything you write. You can hit the return key a bunch of times and start over or write something completely different. You can get halfway through, type, “Wow, this is stupid,” and go get a cup of tea. (That’s something I do pretty often.)
No one has to see what your process was. It’s yours, so own it!
When do I start thinking about the product?
Well, at this point, I advise you not to think about it at all. Like that pianist worrying about the critic and the actor wondering about how many tickets he’ll sell, this is simply not the time to care.
This is the time to remember that businesswoman who threw away the subject she loved and the place she wanted to live in order to gain a product she actually didn’t care about.
Your job now is to figure out what you think about a topic. You might surprise yourself. You might think of some really good jokes (and when you do, you’re not going to worry about the probability that you’ll cut the jokes out of the final draft). You might make a parallel between a book by Jane Austen and your favorite video game. You might take the time to text your friend a drawing of yourself holding Jane Austen upside-down by the ankles. You might decide to spell everything really badly. You might write the end of the essay because that’s what came to you first. You might type it all in Comic Sans even though your assignment clearly states that it has to be in Times Roman. Who cares?
You’re in process mode, not in product!
The more fun you make your writing process, the less you actually think about your end-goal, the better your product will be.
Rip the Page!
