Reading Time: 3 Mins
I am fully aware that everything I am about to write might be coming from that proud parent place where your child’s potentially mediocre output is elevated to a level that others are just incapable of seeing. I have been guilty of this in the past, as has every parent, ever, I’m sure.
That being said…
The assignment my daughter was given last week was to write her own Cinderella story. They have been discussing the tropes within the classic tale and they were to take the basic elements and switch them up to create their own version of the story.
For example, maybe it was a boot lost, not a slipper, or maybe Cinderella didn’t like the Prince at all and didn’t need a man to give her a feeling of self-worth. Great stuff and I can tell it really got her and the kids in her class thinking.
Three pages, that was the minimum for the story, with no maximum. All they had to do was write their own Cinderella story.
Now, let’s pause there for a quick sec and take stock of the changes I’ve been going through over the last eight weeks and the behaviours I’ve been exhibiting that I might have been unconsciously modelling for my daughter.
Since making the decision to seriously pursue my writing in late January, I talk about my writing almost daily and she sees me tuck into my laptop and bang away at the keyboard. I talk about my wordcount and productivity with her. When I wake up at four in the morning because an idea just has to come out, I let her know that’s why I’m moving a bit more slowly in the morning. I’ve told her the process I’ve worked through to balance plotting and planning out the novel but giving myself the freedom to write outside the boundaries I’ve created.
In short, I’ve been very transparent about how focused I am and how seriously I am taking it.
Ego may be at play here, I recognize that, but last night when she wanted to work on her story vs. playing Roblox with her friends, I’d like to think that my focus and determination to create something worth reading has had a bit of an effect on her.
What completely surprised me about what she’s done with this work is how she has approached her story.
She’s working with a classmate and the two of them are each writing their own story, but planning both to be in a shared universe and, at the end of both their stories, their main characters meet.
Her classmate has written more of the backstory and world building while my daughter’s story is more of the action leading up to them meeting. When they need to read their stories aloud to their class, they are planning to go one after the other and they have been editing each other’s stories to ensure there is consistency between them.
This is just fantastic collaboration and she came up with this idea all on her own. I told her how proud I was of her. I did not tell her I’d be writing a blog post about it though. She’s eleven and if there is anything to know about an eleven-year-old girl it is that they are easily embarrassed.
I don’t know how much of my journey has influenced this new-found interest in story writing for her, but I’m loving how excited she is to tell me, not only about her story, but about her process as well.
She’s eleven… the apple has fallen and it likely still has a ways to roll yet, but I’m comforted to know that, for now at least, it’s still fairly close to the tree.