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Children Writing Stories (Paperback) by Michael Armstrong
Writing Magic: Creating Stories that Fly by Gail Carson Levine
This is meant for children, but I found it an extraordinarily useful book for myself as well. By the author of Ella Enchanted.
Raising Writers
Every parent hopes his child will follow in his footsteps. One of the advantages of being an author is that we can do a lot when our children are young to turn them into writers. Since much of our work is done at home, they can see what we do and touch the results.
My mother loved writing, although she never tried to do it professionally. However, from the moment we were born, we were read to and taught to love books. That’s always the first step. One day I came home from school in tears because my homework assignment was to count the number of books in our house and I wailed, “There aren’t any numbers that big!” When my own child got that same assignment, we surrendered after reaching 1000 without finishing the first wall.
Next, she helped me learn to fall asleep by making up stories in my head. Then she taught us to talk out a story, a sort of oral collaboration, as we hung laundry. She put our dictated stories on paper and later taught us to write them ourselves. When I was in second grade, I asked for a typewriter instead of a doll because someone told me authors have to type their stories. There was no way I was going to grow up and not become a writer. My life was designed to lead me gently that direction. Of course, there was no pressure, and if I hadn’t enjoyed it, as some of my siblings didn’t, I wouldn’t have had to continue.
My own children were dictating stories and journal entries from the moment they could put words into a sentence. For them, writing was a natural and everyday occurrence. When I began homeschooling, my children refused to write compositions and term papers. They wrote articles and books.
Make Writing Fun for Children
If you want your children to become writers someday, show them writing is fun. This means talking about the excitement of creation, and being gentle with your corrections. If you turn writing into a torturous time of criticism, you’ll kill the early joy of writing.
A child’s first stories will be filled with plagiarism. That’s natural. They’re experimenting, and they do this by retelling stories they already know. Of course, many professional storytellers tell only stories written by others, so don’t get too worried about this. Over time, you can gently lead them to their own stories. A child with an imaginary friend or a favorite teddy bear can write stories about that treasured friend, which starts him off creating characters. You can play “What if” to get his mind used to inventing stories. “What would happen if Super Friend was home alone one day and a lion came to visit?” As he tells you his story, he is learning to make up his own plots.
Editing Children's Writing
As they get older, you can begin to introduce technique, but be careful of too much red pencil. I tried to choose one skill to work on at a time. I taught my children to type and we sat at the computer together. First, I told them all that was good about their stories or articles. Then I picked out one thing that could be improved and asked questions that would lead them to figure it out. I read to them from books that taught what I wanted them to understand—stories that had great characterization, for example. Then we talked about what that author did, and they naturally applied it to their own writing.
By example, I taught them not to fear correction. They saw me hand over my writing to mentors for correction and be glad for the help. When their stories came back edited by someone when they attended their occasional public school and later college classes, that seemed natural to them. Writers have editors.
I hope I also taught them to have reasonable expectations, to know rejection happens and isn’t the tragedy it seems at first. Mostly though, whether or not any of them go on to publish, I hope I made writing fun for them.
My first choice for kids who write is Writing Magic, featured to the right. I learned a lot myself from this book!