How to Make Your Kid a Writer

I found this post linked from Ta-Nehisi Coates' blog, and I absolutely love it.  You can click on the link too see the whole thing, but I've pasted an excerpt below.  When reading it, I had the same reaction that Coates apparently had: this is not just great advice on becoming a writer, but great advice in parenting.  

First of all, let her be bored. Let her have long afternoons with absolutely nothing to do. Limit her TV-watching time and her internet-playing time and take away her cell phone. Give her a whole summer of lazy mornings and dreamy afternoons. Make sure she has a library card and a comfy corner where she can curl up with a book. Give her a notebook and five bucks so she can pick out a great pen. Insist she spend time with the family. It’s even better if this time is spent in another state, a cabin in the woods, a cottage on the lake, far from her friends and people her own age. Give her some tedious chores to do. Make her mow the lawn, do the dishes by hand, paint the garage. Make her go on long walks with you and tell her you just want to listen to the sounds of the neighborhood.

Let her be lonely. Let her believe that no one in the world truly understands her. Give her the freedom to fall in love with the wrong person, to lose her heart, to have it smashed and abused and broken. Occasionally be too busy to listen, be distracted by other things, have your nose in a great book, be gone with your own friends.

Let her have secrets. Let her have her own folder on the family computer. Avoid the temptation to read through her notebooks. Writing should be her safe haven, her place to experiment, her place to work through her confusion and feelings and thoughts. If she does share her writing with you, be supportive of her hard work and the journey she’s on. Ask her questions about her craft and her process. Ask her what was hardest about this piece and what she’s most proud of. Don’t mention publication unless she mentions it first. Remember that writing itself is the reward.

Let her get a job. Let her work long hours for crappy pay with a mean employer and rude customers. If she wants to be a writer, she’ll have to be comfortable with hard work and low pay. Let her spend her own money on books and lattes – they’ll be even sweeter when she’s worked hard for them.

Let her fail. Let her write pages and pages of painful poetry and terrible prose. Let her write painfully bad fan fiction. Don’t freak out when she shows you stories about Bella Swan making out with Draco Malfoy. Never take her writing personally or assume it has anything to do with you, even if she only writes stories about dead mothers and orphans.

Let her go without writing if she wants to. Never nag her about writing, even if she’s cheerful when writing and completely unbearable when she’s not. Let her quit writing altogether if she wants to.

Let her make mistakes.

It comes, as usual, with good timing after taking a very long walk with Kai yesterday.  We walked all the way to the Platte River, which took us about 30 minutes each way.  To get there we pass through our little neighborhood with houses and families like ours: barking dogs, giggling children, sparrows chirping in the hedges, and the smell of hot summer pavement, the dairy factory to the north, and flowers in bloom.  Afterwards we pass through some Section 8 housing projects leading to Bar-Val-Wood park with adults playing baseball, kids playing basketball, older siblings watching baby siblings, warm pine pitch wafting in the breeze, cottonwoods letting go their fluffy flowers, and the subtle scent of car exhaust and industrial production.  
After passing through the park, there remains a kind of five block dead zone between it and the Platte River: nothing to shade us, no providers of fresh air, just lot after lot of this or that industry.  Yesterday, we passed by mechanic's shops smelling of engine oil, grease, gasoline, rust, and cement.  We saw sparks flying from a metalworking shop soon to close its doors and move elsewhere -- a warehouse cutting and polishing granite.


All of these sights, sounds, and smells made me wonder what will be the sensory triggers for Kai's memories?  Will the slight hint of cinnamon and cream remind him, not of a cinnamon roll, but of the Robinson Dairy factory at 7th Avenue next to the Platte?  When I hear fireworks and think of the Dewey cabin in Idaho, will he be thinking about this neighborhood and their zeal for explosives?  What will be the lasting sensations in his own personal life story?