Forget grammar, ideas and fun are more important for children
Children have enough rules, says author Danny Wallace, so let’s put ideas and fun before grammar
Making kids laugh is great, but watching kids make each other laugh is even better.
There’s a moment in each live event that I do with the ace illustrator Jamie Littler where we turn control over to the kids.
It’s a moment designed to show them that they can be writers or illustrators too, because they’ve already got what they need inside them: ideas.
Add those ideas to a pencil, and you have the Complete Deluxe Writers & Illustrators Kit 2018, which I am currently selling for £24.99.
So we create a character together. We start with a couple of words – pulling them at random out of a mug and ending up with a Burp or a Squeak or a Wax – and we jam them together to create a full name.
The name is where it starts. Maybe it’ll be Thunder Snide. Or maybe it’ll be Snide Thunder.
Perhaps it’s Odd Stunk. Or Mole Crunch. Or Jeremy Vine.
Whatever it is, that one name immediately begins to fire imaginations. Jamie starts to draw, always commencing with the eyes. Hands shoot up in the air as I ask them questions. Second hands shoot up to prop up the first hands. Fingers waggle and strain to be chosen. And we immediately start to work out who the character is, just from those words, and just from those eyes. We discover what it is that makes them funny or scary or annoying. Whether there’s anything likeable about them, because even the most awful person might have something that draws you to them. Whether they have a sidekick, or wear a hat, or enjoy an unusual catchphrase, or have a face that looks like a bottom.
The kids’ ideas get wilder the further we go. They start to buzz from the laughs they get from the others around them. The room bonds. And within ten minutes, a brand new character has been born and drawn on a big screen in front of them, and we’re able to tell them two things: that this is something that just ten minutes ago did not in any way exist, and that no one else in the world has ever created the exact same thing as they have.
Particularly if it has a face that looks like a bottom.
The last time we did it, at a festival in Somerset where
I was talking about Hamish and the Terrible Terrible Christmas, the kids came up with someone called Nit Vile. They felt Nit Vile would fit perfectly into the world of Hamish, and so we found out why.
Nit was an awful, tiny, spiteful girl who as it turns out is the founder member of the Nit Liberation Front. She carried a small sign saying “Free Nits”, while at the same time also giving people nits, for free. Every idea a kid could come up with made it into Nit Vile, because when you decide to be free, then any idea can work. You just have to let kids feel they are free to have those ideas.
This year, the author Cressida Cowell launched something called Free Writing Fridays. The idea is simple: let kids write whatever they want. Just write for pleasure. In fact, just write. They’re free, of course, to share their work with their teachers or parents, but crucially, they don’t have to. It’s up to them. They’re allowed to write without the creeping fear that they’re doing it wrong, or that it’s not good enough, or that they’ll be criticised by a grownup who knows ‘the Rules’. They’re given confidence.
Now, sure, there will be those of you now saying, “what about structure? Writing needs structure too!” And yes, structure is of course something writers need. But it’s also something you can pick up, particularly if – crucially – you are also a reader. And the best way to help a kid read is to give them control.
There should be no ‘wrong’ books to read. There should be no pomposity. Sure, you’d love to see a whole bunch of schoolkids at a bus stop, each of them carrying a Famous Five or a Charlotte’s Web or a Jungle Book. But I would be just as happy to see a bus packed with kids reading the Beano.
To make kids feel there are stumbling blocks placed in front of their reading or their writing is to rob them of magic. It’s like only letting them watch Doctor Who if they study the health and safety hazards form the production manager had to fill out before they could film the stunts. Grammar is vital, but not at the expense of imagination. I have written more than a dozen books, and I bet you I have used fronted adverbials and split digaphs. I bet you I have. But I also bet you I couldn’t point them out to you, and if you insisted and threatened to mark me down, I would ask you to leave. (And then you’d tell me I’m not allowed to start a sentence with ‘And’, and I would do it anyway.)
Ideas matter. Imagination. Enjoyment. Creativity. Freedom. The nuts and the bolts can come later, and if you feel you are allowed to read and write without boundaries – which is to say, become an explorer – then you will.
That day in Somerset with those kids and Nit Vile, I had an idea of my own.
The night before, I’d just finished writing the next Hamish adventure. No one else had seen it. No one knew what it was about. It was still just a Word document, with a blinking cursor on a laptop screen, inviting me to add or delete or change with no consequence and no one else who could know it had happened.
So I told the kids that thanks to them, I would sneak Nit Vile in to the next book. Just a little cameo. Just a small appearance. But just for them.
Because that would show those kids that something they did – ideas they had, laughs they shared, together – could become something real. That something small could become something bigger. That no one could stop us from doing it.
Kids have enough rules already. Let’s have more Free Writing Fridays. Let’s have Free Reading Tuesdays and Free Drawing Wednesdays.
And then let’s tell them they don’t even have to stick to those days.
Let’s give them their ideas, and hand them their pencils.
Let’s let them use their own rules, and find magic that’s all theirs.
● Hamish and the Terrible Terrible Christmas by Danny Wallace is published by Simon & Schuster, out now at £6.99 in paperback.
The idea is simple: let kids write whatever they want. Just write for pleasure