“My daughter wants to be a writer when she grows up. What do you recommend?” As a writer, I regularly get comments like this (If you have emailed me or said this to me in person, don’t feel bad! I’m not complaining about it, I promise!). Today, as a part of the Reading with Your Kids Series, I want to share ideas for how to help your future Pulitzer Prize winner hone his/her skills. If you are raising a writer, or if you just want to encourage your child to be a better writer, I hope these ideas help.

Write, But Don’t Overdo It

Encourage your child to write daily. The more we write, the better we will get at it. That’s what they say anyway, but so far there is no scientific proof to back it up. My thought is that writers naturally want to write, so encourage your child to write, but don’t push them to write as if they are training in the Olympics. Good writing requires more than just throwing words onto a page day in and day out. Every athlete needs conditioning and must practice more than just one thing in the same way in order to progress. The same is true for writers. We must be writing, but we must also be revising, editing, and reading. When we strengthen all of these muscles, we will be better writers.

There’s a Process

Help your child understand that great writers do more than just sit down and write every day. Great writers develop a process. I have come to learn that every great writer has a bit of a different process, but it loosely looks like this:

Prewriting (developing loose ideas)–

This can be freewriting, brainstorming, detailed outlining, or any combination of these that helps spark the creation of a story. It’s like taking the play-dough out of the containers and deciding how much of each color you will need to create your masterpiece.

You may want to consider providing simple, blank printer paper for this exercise.

Writing a first draft–

It is hard to grasp that a first draft is not the finished story. When I visit a school or classroom, I bring copies of my drafts to show students how my writing began. Accepting that the first thing you put on the page will NOT be the final product is crucial. It’s like building basic shapes that represent what you want your masterpiece to become.

You may want to consider providing notebook paper in a three-prong folder. This can help kids to see that they can take elements from the story and move them around.

Revising–

When I was teaching at a local community college for a few years, I found that many of my students did not understand what this step was. They either turned in their first drafts or immediately went looking for spelling and grammatical errors in their first drafts. Those corrections are “editing” and they are done later. In the revision process, we are reading through our finished draft and fixing it so that it better represents the ideas we have developed in our minds. We may move some parts around or cut parts out completely or add elements that weren’t there before. It’s refining the basic shapes of the play-dough and blending them and smoothing them to get them looking more like what we’ve imagined in our heads.

You may want to consider a green pen to write down ideas on the pages of the first draft. Sticky notes can help, too.

Editing–

This is where we fix grammar and spelling errors. It’s making sure every detail is in place and nothing is missing from our work of art.

You may want to consider a green pen to make corrections that stand out on the page.

Final Draft–

A final draft will probably not be a second or third draft. Many changes go into a good final draft. Help your child to see that this is OK. There is nothing wrong with him if his first (or second or third) draft is not perfect. In fact, the more willing he is to create multiple drafts, the better the final product will be. Help encourage your child so he won’t be discouraged.

You may want to provide a blank book like this or this for your child to put his final draft into.

Expose Your Writer to Great Literature

In the book Principles of Neural Science we learn, “The visual system is the most complex of all the sensory systems. The auditory nerve contains about 30,000 fibers, but the optic nerve (visual) contains one million, more than all the dorsal root fibers entering the entire spinal cord!”

In The Read-Aloud Handbook, Jim Trelease says, “If our experience with language consists largely of television dialogue and conversation, we will never be able to write coherent sentences until we see a lot more of them. If we wait until we’re in middle management and worrying about writing skills, it might even be too late. Learning to write well at age thirty-five is a lot like learning to Rollerblade or speak a foreign language at age thirty-five: It’s not as easy as it would have been at age seven. Vocabulary and coherent sentences can’t be downloaded onto paper unless they’ve first been uploaded to the head–by reading.”

Encourage your young writer to read. If she isn’t exposed to new and beautiful sentences, she will continue to write the same types of sentences and the same vocabulary words in the same way. This will not help her grow as a writer. Instead, expose her to a variety of books. Be sure to expose your child to quality literature and talk with her about what she is reading. Allow her time to read on her own, and still take a few minutes (like 10) to read to her. Writers benefit from hearing another’s perspective on a passage or situation, so be sure to discuss what is happening in the books she is reading and ask thought-provoking questions like, “Do you agree with [main character]?” or “How do you think [character] feels/would feel about that?”

Encourage Your Writer to Meet Published Authors

I remember being a third-grader and having an author come to visit our classroom. Our teacher threatened us with death if we so much as breathed too loudly while she was there! But that wasn’t what I remembered most. I had always loved books and so in my mind the people who wrote books were almost like superheroes. When I actually met one and realized that she was human and didn’t seem to have any super powers other than her ability to write, I quickly believed that I, too, could be an author one day. Authors visit bookstores, schools, and classrooms. If your child’s school doesn’t currently have authors visiting, send a kind email request to your child’s teacher or principal. The SCBWI maintains a list of authors local to your area who are willing to do school visits. Many will even do Skype visits.