In our attic there is a large storage box chock full of scrap books, diaries, lovingly decorated journals, autograph books, song lyrics, half-written poems and packets of teenage-angst filled correspondence between me and my best friends in school. Second only to the crates of photos lying next to it, this box is the closest thing I have to an archive of my life. It is an enormous box of words. I occasionally wonder (and worry about!) what my daughters will make of it when I am gone… but I can’t bring myself to dispose of it. Words are like that. As a form of expression, writing has always been my go-to. Whether for an audience, to capture a moment or feeling I never wanted to lose, to communicate with someone, or simply to work something through, writing is a constant in both my professional and personal life. It is often the case that I write the words I cannot say.

I began my career having majored in children’s literature, language and literacy. I could not wait to teach young readers and writers. As a full-time classroom teacher, supporting children to publish books, writing together for multiple purposes and using literature to inspire the craft of writing was a joy. My interest in inquiry as an approach to teaching and learning only amplified my commitment to seeing children as authors and to mining wonderful literature for what it could teach us about language.

In the early nineties, I was commissioned to write some books for a school-based reading series. Along with my husband Stephen Ray who has a background in zoology, I wrote books about snakes, beetles, lizards, eagles, frogs and nocturnal animals. Combining my love for writing with his knowledge of zoology was an incredible, creative challenge that helped me understand so much about language and the communication of ideas. I have written many books for teachers and countless articles and blogs … but writing for children was an entirely different experience. It was so much harder than I anticipated!

Many years later, and many books for teachers in between, I had an idea.

Well, I should say that the idea had me. Winsome was like that. She waited until I was on a rare holiday, on my own, in the quiet of a warm evening when she decided to whisper her way into my heart, and a new book was born. It took two years and a pandemic for ‘The Wonder of Winsome’ to evolve from an intriguing idea and creative urge to a book I am now able to hold in my hands.

Creating a narrative for children has been such another deep inquiry into the process and craft of writing. I feel as if I have been travelling on parallel tracks – one as a writer and the other as a teacher. As I have been writing, I have also thought a lot about the way we ‘teach’ writing to our young learners. In this post, I want to share some of the lessons I have learned. They are not new ones, by any means, but I hope they are worth being reminded of…

1. Writing ( however much one likes it ) can be plain ol’ hard work. The initial romance wears off.

Expecting our young writers to work on a piece with sustained energy and enthusiasm is unrealistic. We need to acknowledge the challenges and talk about how we can work through the ‘dips’ in our enthusiasm. Timely feedback, plenty of opportunities to share those moments when they are ‘stuck’ and listening to real authors talk about how they push through those times can be so helpful. Share strategies that focus on the mental process of sustaining your focus as much as the specific strategies related to the craft of writing.

2. Just because you are not writing doesn’t mean you are not composing.

Every writer’s process is different, of course, but something I was very conscious of was just how much time I spent thinking about the writing. Some of the most productive composition work happened when I was not actually writing but on a walk, in the shower or in the car. It made me think about the times I urged kids to keep going with their writing or the hasty judgements I made if they were staring off into the middle distance. Dreaming, imagining, visualising, rehearsing – these are part of the process and time needs to be available to young writers to do so. We also need to let them step away from a piece - even start something else and come back to it. Flexibility, time and permission to ‘put it on the back burner’ can be critical to the quality of the piece.

3. Writing is an inquiry in itself.

Inquiry is an iterative process. It involves investigating, or trialling, or testing something and often re-thinking, changing tac, reviewing. Writing is far from linear. Like any journey of inquiry it loops back in on itself, takes unexpected twists and turns and is in a constant state of revision. I was so conscious of the messiness of this process. Building this story was by no means, a neat organised narrative arc. Yet how often do we suggest to children that their stories start at the beginning, get to a ‘complication’ and finish with a resolution. How often to we slip into teaching the process of writing as if it were a fixed recipe? Do we help children see that writing is so often a non-linear process that is refined and reshaped over time? A story may begin in the middle…

**4. When you are writing because you choose to and about something that you care about, your desire to do it well is enhanced.**

I chose to write this story. I chose to write a narrative. I chose to write it about something I care deeply about. Having made that choice, I felt committed to see it through. I cared about what I was writing and wanted the words to connect with my readers. Too often, of late, I have heard teachers talk about giving children choice in writing as something special – a once a week ‘treat’, an exception. To deprive children of the opportunity to regularly write about things they care about seems to me to do a grave disservice to the child and to the craft of writing itself. Choice should be the general rule rather than the exception.

5. Writing is often a team effort.

While I wrote the book – it would not be what it is without the many collaborations I sought during the process. I had friends, teachers, parents and children all read it at various stages and their responses were incredibly helpful in the process of re-thinking and refining. This is the case with all my writing. As a writer you don’t wait until your work is published to have an audience read it, you road test it along the way. As young writers, our children need plenty of opportunities to confer with educators and peers. We need to help them feel comfortable with reading their work aloud to each other, swapping drafts for feedback, learning how to give and receive helpful advice. Writing in solitude and under exam/test conditions is about as far away from the reality of writing in the real world as I could possibly imagine.

6. Receiving feedback is not easy

Taking your writing to someone is is a risky act and requires courage! When we confer with young writers, we need to remind ourselves of just how vulnerable they may feel. It can be hard to distance the self from the writing. As we confer with our writers, let’s continue to remind ourselves to find what’s working for us as readers in their piece and to show a positive, sincere interest in the child’s intention and their subject matter before moving to a teaching point. My readers were beautifully curious about what I was setting out to do and made it safe for me to receive their thoughts.

7. Brevity can enhance quality.

If you have ever tried to craft an abstract for something or even get a tweet down to the right number of characters, you will know that writing less is so much more difficult than writing more. Writing for children meant keeping the text succinct which was a delicious challenge for me as a habitually wordy writer! It made me a better one. Let’s keep encouraging our young writers to aim for quality over quantity – to take delight in crafting one, really beautiful sentence. Let’s be careful aabout saying things like “Wow – look at all this writing! Look how much you/she/he wrote!”

8. Words, illustration and design have a powerful relationship.

The relationship between illustration and words is a profound one. Sharryn Madder’s art work elevated my story to a level I had not anticipated. Her gentle, detailed drawings brought a whimsy to the book that words alone could not achieve. I rewrote some sections on receiving her art work. The designer (my brother Graeme) added even more shape and meaning to the story through the way he played with fonts, colour and placement of images around the text. As I experienced this process, I wished I was back in the classroom. Now I would work on forging relationships between authors, illustrators and designers in the process of book-making. How often do we do this? What connections might we make between design technologies and our children’s writing or between our passionate artists and our budding authors?

9. Grammar, spelling and punctuation can be fascinating to inquire into - when the time is right.

If I had had to fret too much about grammar and punctuation in the beginning, I doubt I would have a book today. My focus on things like ellipses, the positioning of inverted commas, whether to begin a sentence with ‘And’ and a range of other technical decisions all came later. And by the time they did come, I approached them as an inquiry. How did other authors do it? Was there actually a rule about this? What if I broke the rule? Is the convention the same in Australia as it is elsewhere? Grammar, spelling and punctuation can become fascinating points of inquiry as one moves towards publication. Using mini lessons, and targeted small focus groups at the point of need (for example, gathering a group together who have all included dialogue in their pieces) allows us to meet writers’ needs in a ‘just in time’ rather than ‘just in case’ way.

10. Having an audience can make all the difference.

I wrote this story for people to read. For kids and for their parents and teachers. I am writing this blog with an audience in mind. Most of the writing I really put my mind to is for an audience and has a clear purpose. I don’t tend to put the same effort into my daily journal because that’s just for me. Our young writers need an audience that goes beyond the teacher. This, in itself, positions them as an author which fuels that powerful writer’s identity. Perhaps I am not looking in the right places but I don’t see the lovely, published books in classrooms I once did. I don’t see children in author’s circles giving each other honest feedback about their writing in order to inform the next draft - and the next. Composing stories that become books for others to read is one of the most beautiful, authentic contexts for writing we can offer children. Without the thought that my little story might end up being read to a group of children somewhere in the world, I doubt I would have persisted,.

The wonderful Matt Glover who helped me launch my book last week (check out his great ‘Author to Author’ site where authors discuss their writing process) , often reminds us that writing is one of those things we all teach, but don’t all do. The journey of writing ‘The Wonder of Winsome’ taught me so much about teaching writing itself. It was a true inquiry process in which I discovered as much about myself as a writer as I did about the process of publishing.

We are better inquiry teachers when we make time to inquire. We are better teachers of writing when we make time to write.

When did you last give yourself time to write? What did you discover? Do your children see themselves as authors? Do you encourage your students to write for and about what they care about?

(For stockists of “The Wonder of Winsome” go to the shop at kathmurdoch.com.au)