The following article has been excerpted from Encouraging Your Child’s Writing Talent. This book brings a new perspective to teaching kids writing—one that helps parents encourage and cultivate a child’s creative insights and love of words through the writing process.

Creative children look twice, listen for smells, dig deeper, build dream castles, get from behind locked doors, have a ball, plug in the sun, get into and out of deep water, sing in their own key.
—Paul Torrance, 1973

In Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s The Little Prince (1971), we, with the Prince, learn that “what is essential is invisible to the eye”; that it is “only with the heart that [we] can see rightly” (p. 87). Good writers are able to go beyond spelling, grammar, and coherency to make the invisible visible. Gifted writers have more than an average ability to communicate with clarity, to write with technical ease, and/or to express deep emotion. They can meaningfully communicate in ways that surpass conventional patterns or strings of words on a page. Their heightened ability to communicate exceeds the typical development of the rote skill of writing, and becomes integrated and enmeshed with higher order thinking and in-depth manipulation of ideas, eliciting in us aesthetic, intellectual, emotional, or visceral responses. Gifted writing causes us to open our hearts wide for the information, messages, and stories.

In The Neglected “R”: The Need for a Writing Revolution (College Board, 2003), a report by the College Board’s National Commission on Writing, we are told that writing, at its best,

. . . has helped transform the world. Revolutions have been started by it. Oppression has been toppled by it. And it has enlightened the human condition. American life has been richer because people like Rachel Carson, Cèsar Chàvez, Thomas Jefferson, and Martin Luther King, Jr. have given voice to the aspirations of the nation and its people. And it has become fuller because writers like James Baldwin, William Faulkner, Toni Morrison, and Edith Wharton have explored the range of human misery and joy. (p. 10)

Our children may be destined to add their voices to these ranks. What will motivate us to care about the human existence of our future? Who will inspire us to understand, recall, or connect new ideas with wisdom of the ages? In their capacity as writers, our children may well be those to document the greatest discoveries yet. Whether or not your child competes for the Pulitzer Prize, he will, throughout his life, be writing to inform; to record, define, and explain; to condense, summarize, and interpret; to teach; to persuade; to prompt, amuse, or inspire; and generally, to make sense of this changing world. True writing begins with listening. Knowing how to open the heart of a reader can fulfill the life and purpose of a writer. Even young children are capable of meaningful communication experiences, and some signs of an advanced penchant to be a writer are noticeable in emergent and beginning writing. We just have to know what to look for, how to see it, and how to inspire or encourage it.

Fulfilling our children’s lives and purposes as writers is to allow and encourage them to write about what they care about, for causes that move or inspire them. As my 16-year-old son learns to drive, I am reminded that no one is motivated to become a good driver by learning about driving. Would-be drivers are not inspired by learning how to position the rear-view mirrors, or learning the facts of how many lives are saved by the proper use of seatbelts. Would-be drivers are inspired by their experiences in watching others drive by in nice cars, and by envisioning themselves behind the wheel, confidently gliding toward a desired destination. As real driving becomes a more realistic possibility through practice driving with a learner’s permit and a driving instructor, the importance of the rear-view mirror and seatbelt safety automatically take on their proper priority. The process of real driving makes all the little parts of learning to drive significant and personally meaningful.

This also is true for becoming a good writer. The ideas that fill our children’s minds and the stories that whisper to their hearts must be told in order to make all of the separate skills significant and personally meaningful. For some children, there is meaning and truth literally locked inside their minds, waiting for the right key to open the door to something they will love for the rest of their lives. Writers are fulfilled when they write the stories their hearts need to tell. The writing process can be outlined simply as the writer choosing his topic, deciding on his purpose, targeting a desired audience, taking his time to draft and redraft, talking over his writing with others he trusts, and, if he is lucky and still interested, publishing his creation. In determining if a child has the ability or gift for writing, do we help her discover those ideas and stories, or do we give her the skills and let her find the ideas and stories for herself?

Teaching children how to write is hard, because writing is a whole array of multiple skills rather than just one skill. This array of writing skills includes creating, sequencing, spelling, categorizing and organizing, rereading, and supporting big ideas with examples. These subskills are developmental, and they can be learned. In fact, most children absent of debilitating learning problems do eventually learn, figure out, and practice writing to some extent. Traditionally, the ability to pass a test and to produce some specific piece of writing has been the ultimate goal of learning to write. In the classroom, the writing process has all too often been the teachers’ means to those ends—passing tests and completing products. However, overemphasis on product is destructive to good writing, and can whip the gift and the desire for it right out of some children’s lives. Many traditional approaches to teaching writing focus on correctness and drilling of skills to the detriment of content.

On the other hand, overemphasis on the process of writing (just writing to write), can undervalue correctness and skill to the detriment of a good and desirable written product. Offering motivation or inspiration for children’s writing without empowering them with knowledge and ability can be a detriment to a natural development of an enjoyable and powerful tool. Overemphasis of the process can prevent the completion of products that reward the writer’s process. Overemphasis of either process or product as more important than the other is unhealthy. However, it is clear to mentors with a great deal of experience managing the writing process and reading thousands of pages of others’ writing products, that valuing good ideas is more important than correctly expressing mundane ones. Children deserve what writer Ralph Fletcher calls “honesty tempered by compassion.” He states, “Our words will literally define the ways they perceive themselves as writers” (1993, p.19).

Parents who wish to mentor their child’s writing life should hope to do more than hone their child’s conventional expression of ideas with pen to paper or fingers to keyboard. Our mentorship as parents should be more about discovery than judgment, more about fluency than technique, and more about mentoring than assigning. Writing is learned through writing, reading, and perceiving oneself as a writer. Writing teachers must gain an understanding of what a child faces in learning to write. We must develop in ourselves a vision that will inspire our child-writers to think, speak, and plan like the writers whose prose and poetry they love, and whose books we buy. We can, with our young writers, learn to look at their writing with intense curiosity and desire for understanding as we clear a path for them on their journey to opening hearts wide—ours, their own, and others.

Children who are or have the innate potential to be gifted writers usually display considerable imagination. They may readily come up with unique stories, either spontaneously, or in a more drawn-out process. Their creativity may be manifested in many ways, but it will be particularly apparent in verbal expressiveness. They may show remarkable facial or physical expressiveness, use fascinating vocabulary, and be drawn to read and reread (or repeatedly listen to) vivid descriptions in books and stories.

You may come to recognize innate ability for writing when you notice your child exhibiting some combination of the characteristics listed in Table 1 and discussed in detail in the next few sections. Many of these same characteristics and behaviors have been noted in writers’ group discussions, and in dialogue between successful writers and published authors. Some of these innate characteristics have been notably present early in the memories of numerous published authors.

Your child may tell stories or relate events with great detail and expression. Most of us are storytellers. We are constantly telling each other about our lives—what happened to us, what we saw, what we thought. We share news of dramatic events in our lives and in the lives of our friends. We repeat jokes we have heard; we share dreams and memories. Watch children in any group setting where they are invited to share a comment or a connection to the discussion topic. Children rarely want to stop sharing, and many a preschool or kindergarten teacher has lost control of an organized group discussion, and of her own reactions to the delightfully innocent observations depicted by the children. The desire to tell something begins very early for most children, much earlier than their ability to write down their thoughts.

However, detailed verbal explanations and questions—even some early humor, as well as animated verbal and physical expressions with which some children share their news or ideas—can be motivation to attempt documentation of their words in writing. This willingness to put their words in print, including details that are important to them, may be very distinguishable signs of a propensity to write well. In Figure 1, we can see two descriptions of losing teeth, written by two different kindergarteners. The writing topic was inspired by the discussion that followed one girl’s announcement that she had just lost her first tooth over the weekend. Every child then had a story to tell, and many of them were willing to write their stories down.

A first-grade teacher who holds regular morning meetings (open discussion about child-selected topics) and a daily writing workshop, asked her students to write a letter to someone. One little girl’s letter, at first glance, actually worried the teacher, until she got to the end (see Figure 2).

The teacher recognized the true intended recipient of this letter, a bruise on Elena’s leg, because of the illustration. This little writer is already playing with the concept of personification. Notice that she is not concerned about every convention of writing in her draft, but demonstrates some sophisticated guessing by dividing the word made into “ma-de” at the end of the line.

Your child may develop some system of organizing thoughts to make sense of his or her world. Innately able writers somehow give shape and focus to their ideas. Some like to talk, or ask questions, or have questions asked of them. Children will usually become comfortable with one or more of these thought processes. They may enjoy drawing a picture and then explaining it in great detail. Many children rehearse thoughts in their minds before they speak out. They may think about how to begin, what to say next, and how and when to end their verbal thought or retelling. They may sometimes forget to verbalize some step in that thought process. Wise teachers and parents will not dismiss comments that seem to have no connection to the topic being discussed. I have admired teachers who respond with something like, “I’ve never thought of it like that before. How did you think of that?” When my children were young, an acquaintance pointed out that he had heard my husband on several occasions asking our children, “Where did you get this idea? Please tell me about this.”

Wonderful and purposeful discussions occur in groups of young children where the adult honors the children’s thinking processes, even beyond what seems to make sense when first spoken. One of my students found out firsthand the strength of a child’s thought process. After multiple grueling sessions helping her 5-year-old son complete his reading and writing exercises (kindergarten homework), my student found a note on her pillow (see Figure 3). Her son composed and drafted the note in his invented spelling and new mode of expression, all by himself.

Innate writers may become fascinated by words, letters, and sounds. An acquaintance of mine bought an illustrated dictionary for her 7-year-old granddaughter. The little girl carries the dictionary with her everywhere she goes. She copies entire lists of words from her dictionary. She writes notes to her friends and family members, always referring to the dictionary for new words to include in her notes. She reads long strings of words from several dictionary pages in a row, and giggles about how some of the words sound to her, or how some of the sounds feel when she says them.

While some children whose writing ability is just emerging will go to great lengths to find the proper spelling of a word they must use in their writing, because they have heard or seen the word somewhere else, other children are determined to get their message across with the right words, regardless of their lack of knowledge about the conventional spelling. Even a child’s invented spellings of relatively sophisticated vocabulary can reveal a rather sophisticated experimentation with sounds before the child is actually able to recognize and remember the conventional spellings. When a child writes a complex word, even if it is misspelled, it may be worth noting how he or she perceives the spelling that has prompted its use. Teachers often observe that children’s naïve use of complicated language reflects the levels of their listening comprehension levels. This is a particular source of humor for first- and second-grade teachers after they’ve endured 30 minutes of short writer’s conferences and answering numerous “Teacher, how do you spell . . . ?” requests in the writing period.

I observed the passing of notes between two first graders who were presumably imitating some movie dialogue. One of the 6-year-old girls wrote, “He was jrivn to love me.” Her use of a phrase such as “driven to love me” was a rather humorous attempt at sophistication in the first place. But, when you add the observation of her using “jrivn” as the spelling for driven, you notice her attention to all of the sounds that are present in the word, and a deliberate willingness to chance a guess at spelling it in order to use what she believes is just the right word. A child who feels compelled to use just the right word for every occasion will soon learn the correct spellings of the words she wants to use.

It is important to remember that from the ages of 5–8, children’s inventive spellings can more accurately be called “temporary spelling.” The important element here is not the correct spelling upon first drafting the use of interesting and fascinating words, but the fact that this interest will lead to an interest and fascination with the conventional spellings. Words that have personal meaning to a writer are words that will inspire a writer to seek conventional knowledge. Oh, that our children may feel the freedom to thirst for new words! Poet Georgia Heard (1995) understands this personal connection; she loves words and language even today:

I haunt used-book stores, searching for books that contain unusual words. Elementary Seamanship has a glossary of sea terms: scupper, bulwark, winch, windlass, scuttles. The book is a cup of possibility for those days when I’m thirsty for words. (p. 47)

Your child may exhibit a playfulness with language. An example of playfulness with language in an early writer can be seen in Figure 4.

This first-grade author discovered, while she was writing her draft—the first ideas that came to her mind—that she could write a lot of words by describing her topic with first a rhyme (bug hug), and then a list of all the family words she knew. It was apparent that she liked what she had written when she read her words out loud and discovered there was a little rhythm in there, as well. That discovery led her to immediately share her new poem with her teacher.

Rick Walton, prolific author of picture books that feature a playful use of language and parts of speech, credits an eighth-grade teacher with inspiring his enjoyment of words. The teacher held a contest for creating the longest list of compound words—the winner would have lunch with a local college basketball celebrity. Rick began searching for compound words, and his final list included 1,500 compound words, written by hand on a stack of papers. He says it was easy for him, as he recognized that he loves words. “I loved playing with words. I loved reading words, and writing words, and studying words, and finding out interesting facts about words” (Walton, 2003, ¶ 4).

Rick has built that love of wordplay into a successful career writing pictures books, including Once There Was a Bull . . . frog (1997), which plays with compound words. Other books include Why the Banana Split (1998), which presents synonyms and idioms, and Bullfrog Pops! (1999), which features transitive and intransitive verbs and direct objects. These, along with Walton’s many other books, demonstrate the influence of his early and ongoing love for and clever play with language, and have become favorites of elementary teachers and students alike.

Mem Fox, whose mother was an English teacher and whose father was a minister, also relies on wordplay in her writings. Fox (1993) tells of how the language of the Bible and of Shakespeare influenced her writing and speaking:

The sonorousness, position of words, the number of words per phrase, the rhythms of those phrases, and the placement of the pauses have been collected in a storehouse from which I draw constantly, particularly for opening and closing sentences. Listening to the Bible developed my need to read aloud every sentence I write in order to check its balance and meaning. When I read or write, I hear. The words I’ve read ring in my ears and reverberate against the ceilings of my storehouse, echoing their way into my own writing. (p. 31)

Your child’s writing may convey distinctly unique personal voice. Personal voice is when your child’s personality shines through his writing, and is akin to recognizing your child’s individuality in what he says and how he says it. Some elements of voice in writing, such as connecting with an audience, can be taught and developed as strategies. But, other elements, such as honesty, confidence, or humor, may emerge early or in their own time, and must be invited, valued, applauded, and nurtured. In Creating Writers Through 6-Trait Writing, Vicki Spandel (2005b) says,

Voice is many things: personality, passion, engagement with the topic, energy and enthusiasm, and audience sensitivity. Because voice builds a bridge from writer to reader, it is much more than a fancy accoutrement; it is a tool for ensuring that the reader pays attention to the message. Voice connects us to the text. (p. 93)

Letting one’s voice come through in writing takes courage, and therefore will likely occur when your child feels safe in writing down her personal truth and in sharing it aloud. I do not mean truth as defined by literal facts. I mean truth as your child sees it and as it encompasses her response to the world; what she sees and believes deep inside. Ralph Fletcher (1993) believes that the best environments for writing with voice are where children can “put themselves on the line when they write” (p. 26). As a teacher, I work hard to develop recognition of my students’ unique voices in their writing. As a parent of a young writer, you will want to try to recognize how your child’s voice in describing a given event differs from his peers’ voices in their writing about the same or similar events.

Some experts on the development of writing have suggested that the courage required of a child to let his or her voice come through is one possible hallmark of extraordinary inclination for writing ability. Donald Murray (1985) has said that voice is the quality, “more than any other, that allows us to hear exceptional potential” in a beginning writer (p. 21). Authors often speak of their own writing in terms of their “craft,” and the writing craft most often discussed in their presentations is that of voice. They recognize it in each other’s writing, and they are thrilled when they skillfully achieve it in their own writing. It may be that your child’s desire to feel unique motivates her to write in a noticeably unique way—in a voice that is all her own.

Your child may find the act of writing and seeing his or her own ideas in print irresistible. A young writer with an innate talent for writing will usually possess an urge to write that is unrelated or unaffected by others’ evaluations and judgments of his or her work. Writers just seem to know, often very early on, that they have to write! If your child has not had much opportunity to see his own writing in print, or you haven’t yet recognized his craving for it, you may be able to recognize this characteristic when you give him a writer’s notebook and the freedom to use it as he chooses.

One of my former students, Emily, is a writer who recently began teaching fifth grade. Emily purchased little notebooks for each of her students, and shared with them often what she wrote in her own writer’s notebook. Emily discovered one child who could not observe, think about, or write enough to satisfy himself. Through his teacher’s guidance and through other writing that she introduced to the class, he began to do what real writers do—keep a notebook full of ideas and inspiration. Emily admitted that without the writer’s notebook experiences of this student, she would not have discovered the boy’s gift for and compulsion to write. Much of it unrecognizable, the student’s writing previously had been judged as sloppy and unreadable by teachers. The freedom to write in his own notebook without the constant scrutiny of a teacher prompted prolific writing. The pages of his writer’s notebook are full of spelling and grammar problems, and admittedly, some illegible writing. But, the content is rich. His pages are full of amazing observations he has made, experimentations with words and phrases he has heard, and attempts at first drafts of purposeful writing products. Figure 5 includes some of his entries in his writing notebook. This 11-year-old boy is a writer!

Your child may love to draw, and do so with more than average detail for his or her age and experience. If your child loves to draw, and draws often and a lot, and if she pays close attention to creating meticulous details in her drawings, she will easily and naturally channel that same creativity and attention to detail in her writing. Your child may readily tell a story about the drawings, or may demonstrate an ability to do so upon your invitation. Seven-year-old Markell has not yet found comfort in her use of the printed word. In fact, her mother has been worried that Markell may have a mild learning disability. But, Markell does compose many detailed stories and situations in her drawings. In Figure 6, Markell explained to her mother verbally that the figure in the middle of the foreground is a groundhog coming out of his hole. She elaborated, “But, he runs back in, not because he sees his shadow. It’s because he is scared of all the lights and cameras set up around his hole.”

The process of drawing with detail is very similar to the process of composing words in writing. When this interest in detailed drawing is acknowledged, encouraged, and nurtured, it will likely develop into the ability to write well as the subskills of writing are learned and mastered. This characteristic of drawing in great detail may actually be initial attempts to reveal some type of emotion about something. Figure 7 was produced in response to a teacher’s instructions for second graders to draw a picture of her—the teacher. The tiger in the forefront and the snake slithering up the tree in this “portrait” may reveal something adversarial about this 7-year-old boy’s perception of the kind of role this teacher played in his life. The 23 other portraits displayed on the classroom wall included only the teacher, and mostly just her head.

Some teachers are bothered by a child who draws pictures all over his homework pages or class worksheets. More often than not, these kinds of drawings are full of rich detail, and supported by well-developed, but unspoken stories or chunks of reasoning. I have observed that doodling in patterns or random marks does not typically occur until one’s late teenage or young adult years. I have rarely seen mindless doodles on younger children’s papers, but I have seen many detailed drawings. I strongly recommend that parents and teachers observe children’s drawings closely, and ask questions or give your child opportunities to describe or explain the drawings before dismissing them.

My 16-year-old son drew all over his primary grade assignments. He often was careless in the tasks required on the worksheets, but more than adequately detailed in his drawings on the same worksheets. Most of his drawings had a theme of piles of space rocks and a specific little reoccurring character. He is now writing and illustrating an original fantasy trilogy, which he began when he was 14. Both details from those childhood drawings, space rocks and the little character, appear in his current attempt at serious writing—first symbolically, and later as major themes.

In his speaking engagements, Christopher Bing, who won a Caldecott Honor award for his book, Casey at the Bat: A Ballad of the Republic Sung in the Year 1888 (published in 2000), has said that he has doodled all over his papers since he was a young child. He loved drawing and he loved stories. As an adult author and illustrator, he has created some beautiful children’s books.

As children, innately able writers may continually attempt to connect their own ideas to others’ ideas. You may notice that your child is constantly connecting her own new ideas to her older ideas. She may verbally express these connections, or spend a great deal of time writing them down. She may volunteer her ideas in discussions as examples of what she understands or believes about the discussion topic. This suggests more of a thinking style or intellectual development than progress of writing ability, and is consistent with the earliest developmental stages that occurred in early childhood. As your child travels along the typical developmental stages in physical, emotional, and mental aspects, he also acquires thought structures, learning strategies, and language. Table 2 describes several developmental theories. Language becomes instrumental in directing his thinking and learning, and the richer his language becomes, the more unstinted is his intellectual development.

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Your child’s discovery of his own ability to connect new thoughts and ideas with old ones is an exciting validation of his own intellect. So is the discovery that he can connect his own thoughts with the thoughts and ideas of others. Even an early curiosity about words and their meanings, with subsequent use in his language or writing is a sign of this development of thinking ability. Interactive discussions about words do occur between children and adults, as was apparent during a visit to a kindergarten classroom. The kindergarten student teacher scolded a little boy for tearing up a picture that had been drawn by the little girl sitting next to him. “This is not acceptable!” exclaimed the student teacher, holding the torn pieces of paper in front of the boy. The little boy looked at the student teacher with a perplexed expression for several silent moments. Finally the boy responded, “I’m going to have to go home and ask my dad about that word—acceptable.”

Environments where open discussion and exchange of ideas is encouraged and engaged in often will produce the occasional discovery that a child has thinking and writing abilities that may not have been realized before. Teachers and parents should be inspired by this discovery, but the children themselves should be delighted by the self-discovery, as well. The confidence this creates is what we often notice about intellectually gifted kids. Naysayers may chalk this up to the child being overtly and inappropriately verbal, or simply liking to “hear herself talk.” However, when this pattern has occurred, we should take notice and look into possible outlets for this self-discovery of intellectual understanding. How is this intellectual development related to writing? It actually inspires and nourishes the desire to write, and the inner drive of the child to improve and sharpen his writing skills. He wants the world to know about the connections he’s making.

A child who keeps and writes in her own private journal on a regular basis, even after a school journal assignment has ended, may be keeping ongoing connections to things she has seen, read, or heard, and sharing thoughts, stories, or comparisons to other literature in her journal. Nate began keeping a journal in fifth grade after his teacher, Emily, presented thinking strategies that she and other authors use. Every few days Nate excitedly shared with Emily his journal entries and compositions that were based on the connections he made in his journal. Over time, Emily noticed that Nate’s journal entries included snippets of Emily’s stories, words and phrases, and written observations similar to the ones Emily had shared with the class.

Nate was obviously connecting his thoughts with the thoughts of others. He wrote down the words of his teacher, phrases from literature she read aloud to the class, and descriptions of his observations of the world around him. Later in the year, Nate began sharing poetry he had written (unassigned) based on entries in his journal. One example of Nate’s poetry and its connection to his journal can be found in Figure 8. This was a powerful insight for Emily that Nate was displaying an extraordinary ability to make and document connections to others’ thoughts, as well as his own earlier thoughts.

Some children organize more than one journal or notebook by categories. By the end of his fifth-grade year, Nate had organized his poetry into separate booklets according to nature topics, family topics, and world peace. Children exhibiting this characteristic of seriously keeping journals should be encouraged to keep and value their journals and notebooks, without being pressured to write in them or share them. These actions can be encouraged by inviting your child to periodically pick out new notebooks, or by giving her several to choose from, while respecting her privacy in what is written in them. My son, who is writing the fantasy trilogy, kept daily entries in several “volumes” of journals at home throughout his second- to fifth-grade years. I didn’t even discover this until the summer between his third- and fourth-grade years. I continue to give him new journals each January.

Your child may write more, and more coherently than peers of the same age. It stands to reason that if a child feels an internal compulsion to write, he will do it more often than would be expected of him. He may feel a great sense of confidence in the quality of his writing, and he may find fulfillment in recognizing his own progress. The more he writes, the more he will like what he writes, and the better his writing will become. However, assigned writing practice or rigid expectations for a quota of written pieces will not always have the same effect. The connection between emerging quality to the amount of practice is not a given. Practice can make writing better, but skill and drill will not make thoughtful, gifted writers of our children. Your child’s most honest motivation to write comes from within. He will naturally come to seek opportunities to write in order to express ideas or respond to circumstances in which he finds himself. He will enjoy discovering stories, books, or articles to read in comparison to his own writing, or to give him ideas about how to improve some aspect of his writing. He may seek fodder for his imagination in order to create something that is new and exciting. You can support your child’s writing interest and ability by pointing out models of print that you enjoy, and sharing in her delight over the writing she produces.

Nate, the fifth grader introduced in Figures 5 and 8, eventually began talking about his writing and himself as a writer in unique ways that were unfamiliar to, and often misunderstood by, the other students in the class. He talked about other authors as if they were his personal acquaintances, and took his writing very seriously as he sought to improve it. Nate often asked his teacher for her opinion or advice about his writing, and earnestly applied her suggestions. This relationship of trust, a sort of mentorship to which Nate responded positively, may not have developed had Emily made numerous assignments for formats and topics of writing. Her writing workshop certainly included instruction in formats and techniques, but it was in response to the needs of her students.

Your child may display a deep desire for the listener or reader to feel something about or because of what has been written. A desire for others to feel strongly about what your child has written may occur simultaneously with her noted preference of taste for a particular genre or author in her reading habits. She may find herself responding or reacting to books or poetry in emotional ways, and striving to communicate similar emotion through her own writing. She may develop a passion for poetry or for letter writing that is more intense than her age- or grade-level peers. She may be keenly interested in researching to write reports on topics of interest to her. If your relationship with your child encourages open discussion of interested or emotional responses to books, movies, poetry, speeches, or other forms of expression, your child will likely share her passionate writing with you, as well. Mem Fox describes growing up in a home where some moments were a “haven of culture and peace.” Her father played recordings of classical music while he read and Mem’s mother wrote.

What did she write? Letters? Stories? She never told us. But from a young age I noticed her doing it, took in the fact that people wrote for pleasure, and tried it myself from time to time, with satisfying results. (1992, p. 33)

Even beyond feeling peaceful and pleasurable about writing, some young writers may desire to convince their readers that a particular cause is right and true. They may appear to be obsessively concerned about an issue, and display emotional outbursts (positive or negative) while they are thinking and writing on that topic. They may seek feedback from others whom they respect or see as capable of similar emotions. This may be the development of passion in its earliest form. Such passion can be very frustrating to a child when it is not mirrored or validated.

Now that we have discussed some of the characteristics of gifted writers, let’s take a look at an extensive range of ways to encourage and empower our writers to open their minds and hearts.

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de Saint-Exupery, A. (1971). The little prince. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

Fletcher, R. (1993). What a writer needs. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Fox, M. (1992). Dear Mem Fox, I have read all your books even the pathetic ones: And other incidents in the life of a children’s book author. New York: Harcourt.

Fox, M. (1993). Radical reflections: Passionate opinions on teaching, learning, and living. New York: Harcourt.

Heard, G. (1995). Writing toward home: Tales and lessons to find your way. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

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Spandel, V. (2005b). Creating writers through 6-trait writing (4th ed.). Boston: Pearson/Allyn & Bacon.

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Walton, R. (2003). How I came to write language arts picture books. Retrieved October 29, 2005, from http://www.rickwalton.com/rickpub/langarts.htm