Encouraging Children to Write

Children can be surprisingly adept at making up stories. They do it all the time, when they lie or need to make an excuse for why they didn't clean their rooms. Schools don't actively encourage it enough, but creative writing can put all that story telling ability to good use.

1. Read: Of course, the very first step in encouraging a child to write is to also encourage them to read. They need to read just about anything and everything they can both get their hands on and understand (so that means no War and Peace for the 1st graders!).
2. Discuss: It works best when you've read the same book or article and can talk to them about it. Share your favorite characters or scenes; talk about what made you want to read to the end of the story. Being diligent about this will lead you to learn what type of fiction that the child likes.
3. Read Some More: Inevitably, people write what they already like to read. After all, it's very difficult to write a good horror story if you don't like horror, let alone have never read any. Each genre of fiction has certain expectations and conventions that readers expect; in fact, they will feel outright cheated if one doesn't employ those conventions in some form or another. The only way to really learn what these expectations are and how to work with them, is to read.
4. Brainstorm: Buy them a journal or a notebook to write in. Encourage them to write their ideas down and to try to plan out their stories. Once a week go through it with them, and brainstorm with them to help flesh a basic idea out into a full story. Make sure that when you do this, you don't supply any ideas though; encourage their creativity, don't write vicariously through them.
5. Support: Hopefully, they will like a type of fiction that you are comfortable with, so that you can be a supportive critic of their work. Most writers tend to be shy about their works, nervous that they either have no talent or that no one will like the story they're telling. Print out their stories and make them into home-made magazines. Start up a blog and post the stories there for others to read -- a community like MySpace is good for this because you can limit who can read the blog.
6. Feedback: The most important thing to remember is that when you give feedback on their work, always be encouraging. Young writers tend to be easily dissuaded from sharing their works if they get negative feedback. Be sure that you focus on things like grammar and spelling; even with computers, grammar errors can slip through and make a piece of fiction incomprehensible.

With these 6 steps, you should be able to get your child to write not just fiction that they enjoy, but hopefully that they can share proudly with the world and have others enjoy as well.