Children and Writing
I’m sometimes asked what’s the best education for writing. To which I invariably reply, seriously and with great ironic delight, “Children.”
It’s true. Children require at once the most stringent protection and the most absolute freedom. You have to protect your kids and keep them safe, even when they don’t understand or see the peril. On the other hand, your job is to get out of the way and let them become the wonderful human beings they are and were born to be. IN writing, you have to protect a story when it’s fragile and new…and you have to be able to expose it to the harshest public criticism possible, if you expect to actually get published.
You also have to leave no doubt about who is in charge. Otherwise children–and the stories–will run roughshod right over you. And kids like boundaries. They like to know where the lines are. The world is a big scary place when you’re little, and knowing that some things don’t change is a relief. And yet the boundaries need to be reasonable, and up for negotiation as the child or the story matures.
Children need to be looked at. They need to be coddled, petted, and enthused over. Giving a child positive strokes not only encourages the behavior you want to reinforce, it also cuts down on the behavior you don’t want. (The old adage about catching more flies with honey than vinegar rings true.) Children are hungry for approval, and will get it one way or another, positive or negative. So are stories. They will bug and twitter and pull your hair, until you write them down or start acting them out, or start blogging endlessly about them. They’ll get their fill of attention one way or another. It’s best to make it positive attention–by which I mean writing the damn things.
As I type this, the Little Prince is cuddled up behind me in the papasan chair. He’s poking at my back with a paper airplane, in between babbling to himself about cars and peering over my shoulder at the glowing screen. The Princess is in the same room, eating breakfast and reading comics. They both like being close while I work, and I’ve grown used to a certain level of noise while I write. Occasionally I have to look up and make a response over the toy/game currently in session, so they know I’m still listening.
And as I often say, just because I’m not looking doesn’t mean I can’t see you. It racks their little brains EVERY time.
Heh. You take it where you find it, as a parent.
Stories are like that too. They gather around, wanting a pat on the head–a few paragraphs here, a few lines there. Pretty soon one realizes one’s written a book, and the baby leaves the nest.
Children and writing both require the utmost discipline, as well. Mum rarely gets sick, and when she does the house goes on as usual. If someone else gets sick, the world has ended, at least for them. But Mum can’t afford to be sick. There’s too much to do. If you’re where the buck stops, you don’t get days off.
Discipline in writing boils down to one thing: butt in chair, hands on keyboard. It’s all very well to have the story in your head, but you need to give it the chance to come out. I chortle at the thought of days off–mostly because I love writing so much I can’t envision a day without it. I suppose some days have passed when I haven’t written something, but they’re few and far between. Even when I’m not actively typing I still go through the slush pile, tweaking a word here, a line there.
Having children was the best training I could have hoped for as a writer. And being a writer gives me a small but necessary detachment when it comes to raising children. Both taught me that so much eventually comes out in the wash, there’s no need to get overexcited.
And both are just so much fun. They’re messy, glorious, wonderful fun.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a teenager to roust out of bed and a gawky, awkward story to revise.
The parallels are just amazing.
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