Um … How do I deliver this?
Being a children’s author, I often speak to large groups of children. Sitting on author panels and participating in writing events etc. I speak to other writers, prospective writers and authors. However, there are certain events where the audience is a combination of both, adults and children. Depending on the age of the children, this can be quite challenging.
The message that I try to share is simply encourage imagination, teach the joy of writing, allow kids to express themselves via words, and of course spend time reading. Every now and then something comes up that force you to change the delivery of what you were going to say. This is exactly what happened to me last week, and I realized it as soon as I stood behind the podium.
As I looked around the audience, parents, students, siblings, small siblings, my immediate thought was, “ugh oh.” The original plan was to inspire, motivate and encourage the children, not unusual during an author visit, but there was such a mixed audience. I had met some parents; some were foreign and couldn’t speak English very well, but impressively where there anyway. Some of the siblings were in strollers, very small, and some were grandparents that had come out in support of their grandchildren. Teachers, staff members, principal, and others were included, a great group of people!
I thought to myself, now how do I deliver what I was going to say? I wanted the parents to realize, that even at an early age their children could be born writers. The children themselves may not know it yet, but the parents may recognize it first, as my mother had when I was a child. The key was keeping the children’s interest and not bore them to death. A dilemma it seemed. Share with the adults without losing the kids. Normally I would give two different speeches and in two different manners, one geared toward children, and one toward adults.
As a child, my mom recognized something I didn’t. Back then my mind raced all of the time, in fact it still does. Often the reason I think why writers can’t sleep; our minds never shut down, they just keep racing. I loved to write short stories and by the time I was nine years old, she encouraged me to write everything down that popped into my head. It was a life saver for me at times, particularly in school. If kids write down what distracts them, they seem to forget about it, at least momentarily. (For me it was, what if’s and can you imagines, poetry and short stories). I knew that I wanted to share that story with an example of how she embraced imagination with the parents, in case they have a child whose mind races at ninety to nothing as well.
I wanted the children to know that they’re never too young to write, but wanted it to sound like fun and not like a chore. Kids don’t write for fun anymore; they write because they have to, but can you even imagine what they could compile if they wrote down what popped in their heads at the exact moment that it did. It could be an incredible story line one day, a story that they were supposed to write, a wonderful song lyric, a beautiful poem, you just never know.
I shared a story of when I was small. My mom embraced imagination and was a fantastic story teller, different than reading a book. She often told me and my sister beautiful stories. One day I ran into