WRITING: Awwwh, and Ahah!

Roberta at Elusive Abstractions shows off her two month-old grandson (that’s the Awwwh!) and then goes on to share a wonderful scene with her older grandson who at five has discovered the power of writing:

What I really want to tell you more so than this trivia is how excited I am about Grandson’s yen to write stories. He told me he knew some magic. And the magic he explained to me is that he knows all his letters. And with those letters, he told me, he can make ALL words.

And with words, he told me, he can write sentences that say anything he wants to say.

“Did you know,” he asks, with his eyes so big and excited, “that I can do that if you help me spell the words? That’s all you need to do and I can explain anything, tell you anything.”

He runs to get a paper and pencil. “Now you help me,” he says, “and I will write a story.”

I love that, the sense of empowerment, the sense of joy in writing.  Roberta takes him a little further:

So just to be silly, I say to him, “ ‘Flexible’ is a pretty big word. Makes me think of another big word. The word is ‘inexplicable’. Do you know what that means?”

“What?” he asks, with head tipped and eyes intent on my face.

“It means,” I said, “something that cannot be explained. That words cannot be found to tell it.”

I had no idea the little storyteller-wordsmith would be so crushed by this bit of information. He gave me the tribal look of disappointment.

“I don’t like that word,” he said. “I don’t like it at all. Me? I can tell anything unless it is a secret. Like for your birthday or for Christmas. There is a way to tell everything. You just have to use the right words.”

There is such wisdom in the mind of children because they don’t complicate things as adults do.  There are simple truths and they accept them; when something happens to seemingly conflict, they find a way to assimilate the new data into the facts to keep it simple:

Later, I heard Grandson tell his Mom. “Know what, Mom? If something is ‘inexplicable’, you can’t explain it. That’s what that word means. You can’t, but I can!”