The wild child comes inside: a parable of hope for reluctant readers

I confess I wasn't much of a reader in my childhood. From age 4 to almost 9, I lived on a 100-acre farm (most of it forested), where I spent many happy afternoons imagining adventures with a host of imaginary friends, a few barn cats at my heels. Being cooped up inside looking at paper was the stuff of school, the stuff of have-to, must, and you'd better.... Out among the trees was the stuff of color, texture, and life of all kinds. The worlds my imagination built were more real to me than Dick and Jane, cursive, and George Washington.

I suspect this concerned my parents a bit. They were both big readers who filled our house with books and magazines. They often read to me at bedtime, and on long car trips, Mom or one of my sibs would read aloud to us. Several books of the Narnia series got us through the insanely long drive from Pennsylvania to my grandparents' house in western Montana.

My parents rarely, if ever, watched TV. In fact, my oldest siblings grew up without one in the house. I was, according to them, lucky to even have a TV. It was black-and-white in an era when absolutely everyone else had color, and we got only four channels out in the sticks--the three major networks and PBS. The 70s weren't known for realistic programming--aside from the Bionic Man, Wonder Woman,  and Fantasy Island, were the distant luxury worlds of The Love Boat, and the sanitized "Old West" of Little House on the Prairie. These shows, plus The Wonderful World of Disney, and some Saturday cartoons made up my entertainment diet, which was quite time-limited. When I complained about my meager TV time, "Go play," was the usual response. So I did.

We ended up having to sell the farm because my father had a mental health crisis. My ability to get lost in my imaginary world saved me, I think. Out in the woods, I could process my anxieties. Nature soothed me and brought joy in a very dark time for our family.

Our new home was a more manageable three acres, part of it wooded with a creek, so the adventures--and my source of nature therapy--continued there. Through a school friend, I soon got caught up in an obsession with horses. Her family had kept them sporadically, and she took riding lessons from a stable near her house. Many a Saturday, I trailed her around the barn, soaking up knowledge about how to care for these amazing creatures.

My seventh-grade reading teacher somehow caught onto the fact that I didn't really read for pleasure, though I had no struggles other than a lack of interest. One day during study hall, she called me over to her closet at the back of the classroom. "I hear you like horses," she whispered conspiratorially. "Check this out." She handed me a book with a gorgeous bay mare on the cover. "You want to borrow it?" Boy, did I ever.

I read every horse book Mrs. Brooks had. Over the next two years, I read nearly every horse story my public library had, and there were quite a few. When I finished those, I read other books written for middle schoolers, most notably Madeleine L'Engle's work.

During the same period, I was placed in the gifted program, and our advisor got us playing Dungeons and Dragons as a problem-solving and creativity-building exercise. D&D draws on historic and fantastical lore from many, many sources, which opened up even more avenues for reading for me. And the storytelling aspect of role play also captured my imagination.

Soon I was writing my own stories. Not just short works, but the beginnings of full novels with large casts of characters. The itch to create worlds with words was a natural outflow of many, many hours spent in creative play early on. My writing only grew from there, and my love of reading continued to flourish into an English degree and a career in publishing.

So if you have a reluctant reader in your house, take heart.  Not every writer starts out bookish. Model good reading habits. Keep your home full of books that are cool to look at. Read aloud to this child and as a whole family, enjoying and discussing a book together. Limit TV and computer time. Give lots of outdoor playtime in nature. Be patient for the right opportunity to let your child follow their passions in pleasure reading.

Have you seen other reluctant readers go on to become writers? What encouragement would you give to parents of reluctant readers?

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Save your memories starting today

Hello, friends. It's a new year, and high time I return to my neglected blog. To help me get over my inertia, I thought I'd respond to questions I've been asked that are writing process-oriented rather than editing-related, and offer some online writing coaching.

Dear Coach Laurel,

I'm looking to write a mini history of growing up. Something to keep memories alive and to share with my mom.  But I can't seem to get started. Any tips or techniques?

Sincerely,
Forget-me-not

---

That sounds cool, and I applaud you. Not many ever take the time, and their life stories are thus forever lost.

I completely understand being daunted by the task. Many people get discouraged about writing, thinking there has to be some secret technique. But beginning an informal memoir project like this is really quite simple. 

Start by considering your most powerful memories--the ones you most want your loved ones to know--and make a list of them. I'd recommend using the jot technique, putting a sentence or two on an index card. You can later sort the cards into chronological order or thematic categories. 

(If you find yourself getting stuck after the first dozen ideas, consider working with prompts like "59 memoir ideas," "drawing from a well of experience," "NYT 500 prompts for narrative and personal writng.")

Next, begin to work your way through your jot-prompts, writing out that memory. Start with whichever memory floods back the most fully when you view your jotted note. Keep in mind that we all gravitate toward problem-oriented stories--what went horribly wrong and how that hardship was coped with.

Tell the story as if you had a kid on your knee, or an old friend across the table, eager to hear about what you did, and what happened next. You absolutely should do that quite literally and record yourself, if that's easiest. Then transcribe your recording. Or just imagine that audience of one as you write, to help you make decisions about what details would appeal most to that person. 

This draft doesn't have to be perfect or even terribly coherent. It's better to write a lot and sloppily than be cramped up with fear about doing it perfectly. My mantra is "You can always fix it later!" Be brave enough to write a super rough draft, let it cool off, then come back to it at a later point and revise. 

Once you have a lot of material, then decide how you want to shape it. Strict chronology is perfectly fine as an organizing principle, though consider grouping material thematically. 

If your goal is simply to preserve family stories for the next generation, don't worry too much about creating a very literary or very sensational manuscript to hook a publisher. (They're mostly interested in celebrities anyway.) Simply tell your experiences as you remember them, with as much detail, humor or wisdom as you can. 

Thanks to print-on-demand technology, it's easy to turn your musings and memories into an attractive book your can pass along to loved ones. 

Q4U: What are some of your favorite memoirs? What might motivate you to preserve your life stories?

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T = Thankful

Welcome, A-Z Blogging Challenge friends. This year, my theme is Prompt-a-day, with fun or thought-provoking writing prompts to use as a story start, warm up, or creativity stretching exercise.

Thankful

Write a thank you note to someone who changed your destiny.

Writing prompts can be a helpful tool, no matter where you are in your writing journey. Here's how: 5 Reasons to Write with Prompts.

Love writing with prompts?

Check out my latest release, 1001 Evocative Prompts for Fiction Writers. It will stimulate your thinking wherever you are in your writing journey and get you writing today. It provides story starts and writing inspiration for a wide variety of genres by focusing on emotions, character development, and pivotal moments.

You can face a blank page with confidence when you use these prompts to warm up, beat writer’s block, develop and maintain a writing habit, change up your routine, start a new project, experiment in a new genre, deepen parts of an existing story, or overcome burnout.

What are you waiting for? Dig in and get writing right now!

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Pocket paperback (5"x 8", 114 pp.) Amazon / Barnes and Noble / CreateSpace
Workbook (8"x 10", 426 pp.) Amazon / Barnes and Noble / CreateSpace


Q4U: How might you spin this prompt in an unexpected direction? How about as time travel romance or legal drama?

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Writing about faith from the margins

By guest author Sarahbeth Caplin

My experience with writing nonfiction has not been what I expected. I never expected to be a nonfiction author, particularly a nonfiction religious author, but writing about religion is when I am most authentic. I would not have nearly the same number of blog and Twitter followers I do if not for my willingness to admit “I don’t know” when writing about theology. Some of my favorite religious writers are people who dare to ask the questions I’m afraid to acknowledge even in my own head. I like to imagine that’s what attracts new readers, and keeps old ones coming back to my blog and my first book, Confessions of a Prodigal Daughter.

Photo by pedrojperez at morguefile.com

A second memoir was just inevitable not because I’ve lived such a unique life, but because the questions kept on growing, and they are hard to find addressed in mainstream Christian books. For converts like myself who still carry baggage from the faith of their childhood, that pool of books has even fewer options. In my case, perhaps books by Jews who converted to Christianity are still too controversial.

At any rate, the person you are when you publish a memoir becomes frozen in time. I’m not that person anymore.

This book is my response to Christians who condemn or otherwise fear the word “skepticism.” It’s a book for anyone, not just converted Jews, who embraced a new tradition as an adult, but cannot for the life of them fit in with the surrounding cultural norms of that new faith. It’s a book for anyone who grapples with doubt on a regular basis.

My story of wading through evangelical waters has been, and continues to be, a fish-out-of-water experience. In Evangelical World, I have met some truly amazing people, but have also experienced a lot of damage, which I think my Jewish upbringing made me particularly vulnerable to.

This is a book about questioning faith and fighting to keep it. This book doesn’t offer any answers, but it has been therapeutic for me to write. I have a love/hate relationship with my unusual testimony, but I don’t think it’s so “out there” that no “cradle Christian” can possibly relate. I come from a tradition that is known for asking questions, and I want this book to be encouraging for Christians bred with the idea that questions are not okay.

Much has changed since the first edition of Confessions of a Prodigal Daughter was published. For starters, I got married. My father died of cancer. The honeymoon phase of my relationship with Jesus has long faded. Restlessness has moved in. Frustration and irreconcilable differences are daily battles.

At the time I started writing Prodigal Daughter’s first draft, I was an opinion columnist for my college newspaper. I wanted the job because I was tired of the pervasive liberal attitudes that permeated the editorial section. It didn’t take long for me to develop a reputation as “that Christian columnist,” only the title was not used favorably. I can see now that my tone was obnoxious in many of my columns. I was writing as someone who thought she had found indisputable Truth. But the biggest mistake I made as a columnist was adopting the assumption that I was disliked by so many because I happened to be Christian, which could not have been further from the truth. As a Jew raised in a small, conservative Christian town, shouldn’t I have known better than to play the persecution card? Why would I have done that?

I know why now, though I wouldn’t have admitted it then. It’s very much a cultural Christian trend to take on a persecution complex, no matter how outrageous it seems compared to Christians across the world being jailed or losing their lives for their faith. More than anything, I just wanted to be included. I wanted to know what being part of the religious in-crowd felt like. If that meant pretending that the obvious Christian majority was actually in danger of extinction, so be it.

Thankfully, the mindset didn’t last. I could only pretend for so long that being the odd Jew out (an actual minority) for most of my life wouldn’t catch up to me at some point. Sure enough, during my year-long stint at a Christian seminary after college, it did.

Confessions of a Jew-ish Skeptic is the story of what happened to my faith when I confronted my inner Jew, who was buried for a time but never actually went away. Perhaps she was never meant to.

About the author

Sarahbeth Caplin has a bachelor’s degree in English Literature from Kent State University, and is currently at work on a master’s degree in creative nonfiction at Colorado State. Her memoir, Confessions of a Jew-ish Skeptic, is set to release this spring. Her work has appeared in xoJane, Feminine Collective, The Stigma Fighters Anthology, and Christians for Biblical Equality. Follow her blog at www.sbethcaplin.com or on Twitter @SbethCaplin.

About the Book: Confessions of a Jew-ish Skeptic

For the first time since converting to Christianity several years ago, I was forced to reconsider what Judaism meant to me after my failed attempt at seminary, and after my father died on the eve of Rosh Hashanah. This is not a story about finding God, but about what happens when doubt threatens to break the faith of your own choosing – and how one seeker chooses to confront questions that don’t have easy answers, if any answers at all.

I feel safer by living on the fringes of faith, where grace and humility are clearer to me than ever before. For now, this is the safest place to be. It’s messy, it’s sloppy, it’s anything but organized. But I’m learning to make it a home.

Buy links:

Amazon (US)

Amazon (Can.)

Amazon (UK)

Where have you felt like an outsider? Have you ever written from an "at the margins" perspective?

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