Without a computer during the day, I find myself writing many blog entries in my head all day long. But when I can actually sit down at the computer, all the words seem to have found good hidey holes and refuse to come out. This also may be my problem with fiction at the moment. (But only if it's a very loooong moment...)
Writing has been on my mind this week in particular because I was privileged to witness its birth in two of my children, ages 9 and 7. It was a sweet moment, mainly because my eldest has had such a rocky road getting to this point.
Gareth didn't come wired for handwriting. Many kids with TS don't. Problems with motor planning are common, and Gareth, unfortunately, is no exception. He still holds his crayons in one of the oddest grips I have ever seen, though after three or four years of work, he now holds a pencil correctly most of the time. The muscle tone in his hands and arms is low. Until recently he tired quickly, and when Gareth gets tired, his very low threshold for frustration is breached. It doesn't take much, and once anything gets over that low wall, nothing productive can be accomplished until equilibrium is established again. In the past re-establishing the equilibrium demolished by the act of merely copying a sentence or two exhausted all of us to the point at which we often just gave up. (This applied to math and reading, too, all the subjects he initially found difficult or boring). I would retreat into my homeschooling books, devouring one after the other in a search for some approach that would help my child not feel as if basic skills were a battle that he was losing. The unschooling books told me that he would start writing eventually if we just provided the right environment. The books on encouraging your child to write told me the same thing. But I was a writer, and my kids often saw me writing, on the computer and by hand, and talked to me about my writing, and yet my son had absolutely no desire to write anything down for himself, or to dictate anything for me to write down for him, or, well -- anything to do with words, if it didn't involve me reading to him.
This was very discouraging to me. I figured that I was the only writer in the universe who had no clue how to go about teaching writing. I knew how I had started writing my stories: one day I was sitting in my grandparents' living room and I had nothing to do. So I picked up one of my grandfather's cheap thrillers (I was twelve years old at the time) and started reading it. The book was called The Takers, and thankfully, it is out of print because it was terrible, and I immediately thought, you know, this book wasn't born; somebody actually wrote it.
(I'd like to say I was inspired to write by all the great books I had read, and in a way maybe that was true because at least I recognized schlock when I read it, but, although I was a voracious reader as a child, my reading was pretty spotty. My parents gave me the run of our (small) rural library, and I was allowed to buy a book whenever we visited a bookstore, which, in those days, wasn't terribly often. But nobody was there to really guide me through literature, to hand me a book and say, I think you will really like this one, or have you read this?, or simply to leave me books on the kitchen table, the way I do with my kids. As a result, I missed some important titles, which I am only now rediscovering as my husband and I read them aloud. The Little House books and Anne of Green Gables are two examples. As a bona fide tomboy, I never read these books because they were too "girly". I stuck with my beloved Trixie Belden mysteries and Black Stallion books instead.)
In any case, I sat down the next day with a notebook and a pencil, and I started writing a book. It began, "The morning stillness was shattered by the hooves of a hundred horses racing across the desert..." because I really did love those Black Stallion books. I studied grammar in school, of course, and occasionally I wrote a report in science or social studies, but I can't remember any of my teachers ever attempting to teach us to write. So when I approached writing as a homeschooler, all I knew was that the writing had fallen out of me one day, and that before I had started writing, I had drawn a great deal, and made up lots of stories with my best friend as we rode our bikes.
This information was and was not helpful when I approached writing with my son. I never had to overcome the physical difficulties he has had to deal with, for instance, and words have always been my strong point. I have always been a pretty good speller, and grammar comes fairly naturally as well, although I do suffer from an over-fondness for commas and a penchant for very long sentences. (As you, dear reader, have no doubt noticed already.)
Gareth, however, also didn't come wired for spelling. We have now worked through a number of spelling approaches (including Spelling Workout, Spelling Power, straight memorization, and leaving him alone and hoping for the best, and none of them seemed to help very much. (We are now about to try AVKO, so cross your fingers.) When you have words in your head that you can't spell and are hard to write, I imagine that it is very frustrating being asked to put them on paper. Last year I tried to get him started typing, but that effort fizzled as well.
What Gareth is wired for, however, is creativity. He has spent the last year creating a detailed universe in his brain, drawing many of its denizens in at least a dozen sketchbooks, and telling his sister their stories at night. (And, oh, the fights I have broken up because he gave her the role of "enemy" whenever he was feeling particularly peeved at her.) This universe began as part of the Star Wars universe, but now it is all his own. His sister has been lured into the act as well, and each of them have their own planets with their own histories and characters.
And on our way home from Vermont last week they began writing those stories down.
I did not expect this development, and it was like unwrapping a gift to find it contained a diamond ring (I mean, if I wore jewelry, which I don't, but it was like that.) It's not that I want my kids to be just like me, although I do think it's kind of funny and nice that they have chosen to start with science fiction. It's more that I could see all these ideas bottled up inside them with nowhere to go. And now they have somewhere to go, and the kids are bubbling over with excitement. They've each written over ten pages in less than a week -- my son who a year ago would scream about writing one sentence, who would throw his pencil down in disgust, who hated the act of writing, who -- until even more recently -- still reversed many of his letters and seemed unable to make his hand move in the loops and swirls required by cursive -- my son has now written ten pages of a story that is obviously not a short story, but a novel.
Who cares if none of it is spelled right, if the letters stagger one into another. Spelling is mechanics, and mechanics can be fixed, just like punctuation and grammar. As a writer, I know that having those basic skills is necessary to effective communication, and yet... all those absolutely necessary skills seem like such small potatoes compared to the thrill of hearing a nine year old boy in the backseat reading aloud to his sister the words he has just written himself: "Spaceships howled across the sky, and the Vulgan fell before the exotic weapons of their enemies..."
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