How to raise a good writer



The true alchemists do not change lead into gold;
they change the world into words. ~ William H. Gass

This is my tried and true approach to raising a good writer.

1. Make words a fun, happy, safe, communal thing in your home. Play with words (knock-knock jokes, Mad Libs, magnetic poetry, any of dozens of genuinely fun, noninstructional card and board games, etc.). Point out clever phrasing when you notice it. Read great (fun!) novels and interesting (fun!) reference books together. Talk about how ads in magazines and signs on businesses are worded and why it might or might not generate any business. Laugh together over words and about words.
   
2. Love words yourself and let it show.
   
3. Fill your home with paper, notebooks, a large variety of pens and pencils, computers with word-processing software and access to the Internet. These are toys for writers! A trip to the office-supply store is bliss.
   
4. Learn to distinguish between writing (content), handwriting, and adherence to rules for spelling and grammar. They are very different things, and a person can be great at any one of them without having any special talent for the others. Also, real writers have keyboards and editors; your child can rely on that, or get through life with spell-checkers and grammar-checkers like most of the known universe.
   
5. Never, ever, ever point out spelling or grammatical errors in a young person's writing. Some people's passion for writing will stand up to this kind of abuse, but it shouldn't have to. Keep in mind that using creative spelling, punctuation, and sentence structure is a natural phase of early writing. Most of us do eventually learn where the period goes and that "cat" is spelled with a "c." Trust.
   
   And meanwhile, focus on content. Share your natural enthusiasm for that, and be cognizant of the fact that by sharing his writing with you, your child is bestowing an honor. Appreciate it!
   
   Note: There is one time when it's okay to offer yourself up as proofreader and that's when your kid is submitting his writing for consideration in order to meet his own goal: winning a prize, getting published, gaining admittance to college, things like that. Otherwise, wait to be asked.
   
6. Protect your child's creativity from writing curricula and well-meaning friends and relatives. The approved essay format, with its rigid structure and counted sentences and paragraphs, can stifle creativity. And Aunt Martha's kindly meant comments to your seven-year-old about subject-verb agreement might serve only to dampen a budding writer's joy in all that is wondrous about writing. Step up and step in, if for no other reason than to show your child that she has choices.
   
7. Respect every writer's privacy. The things your child writes are his to share or not share as he chooses. In the absence of an invitation—and, no, that paper or journal left in plain sight is not an invitation—do what you have to do to control your urge to peek.
   
8. After creating a home where writing is valued and considered fun, check to see if your kid is a writer right now. She might not be, and that's okay! If she is, you will know it; writers write and nobody has to make us do it.
   
   If she isn't, repeat steps 1 through 7, not with the goal of making her into a writer but because words are a playground you can enjoy as a family.

Trust

This is an excerpt from one of my talks at LIFE is Good 2009. It was titled, "Unschooling Teenagers: RATS in the House." RATS stands for Respect, Acceptance, Trust, and Support.

Here’s my little bombshell: I don’t trust my kids.

What I mean is, I don't trust my kids in the way traditional parents mean when they talk about trusting their kids.

Think about it. When a mainstream parent says she trusts her teenager, what does she really mean? I think she means she trusts her teenager to make good choices. And what does that mean? What constitutes a good choice?

Well, that’s subjective, isn’t it? I knew a woman once whose father had encouraged her to be promiscuous when she was a teenager. To him, sleeping around was a good choice. But maybe more conventional philosophies come to mind. Maybe you think about abstinence, or condom use, or saying no to drugs, or putting money in a savings account, or looking both ways before you cross the street. Maybe you think about safety issues.

Fair enough. So, teens who make good choices keep themselves safe.

It sounds reasonable, doesn’t it? But here’s a question: When are our kids safe enough? Where do we draw the line between safety and experience? And more importantly, where do they draw that line?

A couple of years ago, Frank and the girls and I loaded ourselves into a small sailboat and crossed the Gulf of Mexico. During hurricane season. My mother probably thought we had lost our ever-lovin’ minds. And, considering it was the year of Katrina, Rita, and Wilma, she just might have been right.

But my point is, we made our own choices. My parents didn’t choose for us. Now, was our choice a good choice? That’s debatable. Every one of you probably has an opinion on that. I'm sure my mother does.

But here’s the thing: The right and wrong of every single choice each of us makes is debatable. All we can know when we judge another person’s choice is what we would have chosen in the same situation.

So what a traditional parent really means when she says she trusts her kid to make good choices is that she trusts her teen to make the same choices she would choose for him. She expects her kid’s brain to be an extension of her own, to assess and react to a situation just as she would, and to choose the behavior that she would choose.

Well, like I said, I don’t trust my kids that way. The idea that their brains are an extension of mine is silly. Their brains are their own. They will assess and react and choose in their own ways, not mine.

How many of you have seen the movie "Risky Business"? Joel’s parents are out of town, and when they call to check in one evening, they can tell by the noise level that he’s having a party. “Just a few friends,” Joel tells them, and his mother says it’s all right. “You know we trust you.” Of course, at that moment, Joel is running a brothel out of their home and there are prostitutes wearing his mother’s clothes.

Now, my point with this little story is not to say that teenagers are not trustworthy. It is simply to say that even good kids like Joel make their own choices. And then they handle what comes. In the movie, Joel does a lot of scrambling to handle what comes, but he does in fact handle it.

And that is where my authentic trust for my kids comes in. I trust my daughters to make their own choices and to handle what comes. I also trust them to ask for help if they need it.