String Words Creatively

“The spider’s doing trapeze!
“I am green on the outside and blue on the inside.”
“I did a waterfall in my pants.”

These are just some examples of how the under-five crowd uses language. The ease with which they express themselves in fresh and unusual ways never ceases to amaze me. As writers, we want our writing to be original, imaginative, meaningful and I think children can teach us alot about how to use words inventively.

So what can we learn from them?

* Suspend the Rules
Children aren’t bothered about the rules of grammar and syntax, neither are they overly concerned with the proper order, place and context of word usage. They have an unconventional approach to putting together a sentence. Now, agreed that we don’t want our sentences to read as infantile drivel, but as writers we can get lost in the ‘proper’ and compromise on a need for unconventional thinking and approaches. Sometimes, its good to invert the rules of language and see where that takes us.

* No Self-judgement
Young kids have no inner censor, editor or filter telling them to second guess themselves. There is no perfection paralysis, none of the self-criticism we acquire as adults. We need to approach our writing with the same fearlessness, zip through our first drafts with unselfconsciousness and have simple confidence in our abilities to get our message through.

* Sense of Play
The most refreshing thing is that children come to language from a place of wonder and play. They explore, experiment and are resourceful in word usage. Until their vocabulary develops, they use words in unlikely combinations. As writers, we get stuck in ruts, bogged down by the work and business of writing and forget about rediscovering the joy that writing brings us. We need to remember the reasons we choose to write and the delight of creating a sentence that sings.

Scribe’s Tip!
Pick up any book and randomly select 10 nouns. Write them in a column. Pick up another book and randomly select 10 verbs and write them in a second column. Now match the first word from the noun column with the first word of the verb column. Do it for all ten nouns and verbs. You can come up with some very unlikely word combinations that can trigger your writing.
(I just got “months drive,” “sun shapes,” and “windshield suspended,” which has given me an idea for a poem.)

Play with words! Until next week.