Creative Writing: The Good, The Bad, and The UGLY Amazing!

Posted by Melinda | 0 comments

If anyone had suggested to me when my son was younger that I would someday be writing an article on how to teach creative writing, I would have been incredulous. My son was a classic reluctant writer. He had plenty of ideas and loved to draw pictures. But when I asked him to actually write words and sentences he acted like the very pencil he had been happily doodling with moments before now burned his hand as if it was covered with acid. He acted as if he could barely remember how to grasp a pencil, yet alone use it functionally. Let me share with you what I tried that worked as well as what didn’t work so that you can hopefully avoid some of the potholes I hit on the road to teaching creative writing.

If the actual act of writing is challenging, observe your child and see if fine motor skills need to develop a bit more.

A child who struggles with the physical coordination needed for writing may get bogged down as he attempts to get his thoughts down on paper. Be sure your child is grasping the pencil correctly. Sometimes a simple pencil grip placed on the writing utensil makes writing physically easier for the child and thus frees the child to concentrate on developing his ideas rather than wrestling with his pencil and the mechanics of writing.

My son, Josh, was diagnosed with AD/HD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) and he matured at a slower rate than his typically-developing peers. It was hard for him to sit still for long and his fine motor skills and general coordination were not as developed as his cognitive skills. In other words, he had the ability to come up with ideas but lacked the focus and skill to sit down and write his ideas on paper. I still had him do some of the writing so he could practice and develop those skills. Some of the time, however, I let him dictate his ideas to me and I did the act of writing. Seeing and hearing his own stories read back to him was very motivating.

Another way to encourage the creative juices is to get some paper that is blank at the top and lined on the lower half.

The child can draw a picture to help illustrate their stories. Another advantage to this type of paper is that children who are overwhelmed at the thought of writing to fill an entire page view a half page as much more manageable. More manageable means less reluctance to write, and a relaxed writer has an easier time coming up with creative ideas to write about. This could also be a multi-age project, with a younger sibling helping to illustrate or contribute to a story with an older sibling. An older sibling can show the picture as she reads to the younger children. Having an appreciate audience for what’s been written is great motivation to write some more.

Do not make a big deal over spelling errors.

One mistake I made was to have Josh correct all his spelling errors. Since Josh was a very poor speller, having to make all the corrections was discouraging to him. Josh was a laborious writer with a pencil and paper in the first place, and to have to go back and fix all his errors was disheartening. Being a bright boy, Josh changed a few things about his writing at that point. First, he began to limit his writing to words he knew how to spell. This was not conducive to creative writing, and his topics were severely restricted. The second thing Josh did was to revert to simple noun verb sentences because, you guessed it, I was also the punctuation police for his writing. In essence, Josh taught me about teaching creative writing by pointing out what I did wrong that inadvertently was crushing his creativity.

If your child has only occasional misspelled words, give them the “underline option”. This means that if you are writing and use a word that you think may be misspelled, underline it and keep on writing. Later, you can go back and check the spelling of the underlined words by looking them up in a dictionary. If you have a speller like Josh who will have many spelling errors, teach him the underline option as well but don’t ask him to look up all those words in the dictionary. Usually the child knows what the word means as they write, they just are unsure about the spelling. If you ask a poor speller to look up all the misspelled words she may begin to use small words that are easier to spell and faster to correct. More advanced vocabulary words will not be found in a children’s dictionary, leaving the student who has difficulty spelling trying to find a word in a thick, small-print dictionary when he doesn’t know how to spell it in the first place.

Instead, invest about $20.00 in a Franklin Spelling Ace or similar device and teach your child how to use it. About the size of a calculator, the Spelling Ace is designed so that you can type in a word the way you think it is spelled and then see a display of possible words. Often a child can identify the word they were attempting once they see it, even though they could not generate the correct spelling on their own. This is a much faster way for a poor speller to find what they need than to have him looking up words in a dictionary. Teach dictionary skills, sure, but don’t overuse them when a simple spell check is all that is needed.

As for Josh, when he transitioned to keyboarding (hurray for spell check!) his creative writing really took off. After graduating from high school in 2006, he began pursuing creative writing with a passion. At the present time Josh has written three science fiction novels and has 47 novels started or in progress.

Melinda Boring has been married to Scott for 25 years and has three homeschooled children. Her 22 yr. old son and 21 yr. old daughter graduated from home school in 2006, leaving Melinda an “empty desker” of two along with her 17 year old daughter who will graduate in 2011. Two of her children and her husband have been diagnosed with AD/HD. The children also deal with auditory processing disorders and sensory processing challenges. The name “Boring” just doesn’t fit this family, and Melinda shares many humorous moments in her speaking and writing endeavors. Melinda is the author of Heads Up Helping and has been a contributing author to multiple publications. She is a workshop presenter with a passion for helping struggling learners and providing practical strategies, compassion, and understanding for those with special needs. Melinda is also a speech/language pathologist with over 25 years experience and the owner of Heads Up, a company with products for those who learn differently. You can find her blog at the Heads Up website, where she writes as “Heads Up Mom”.