The Gift of Squiggles
By Kira Hardison

I'm a writer, and I love writing. I love its power to communicate, to evoke emotion. My son is seven, and for him writing is more accurately described as a chore. It smacks of schoolwork. However, I have a sneaky tool in my struggle to win him over to my side. It's a notebook, an ordinary purple spiral-bound notebook. Across its cover is written in black, "Squiggles."

The concept of squiggles is fairly simple. On a blank page I draw a simple shape, perhaps a circle or a wavy line. I've even used numbers or letters. My son then draws a picture incorporating that shape, and writes a short story about it. For example, a curved line in one squiggle became the slope of a mountain with a delighted-looking stick-figure scaling its heights. The story told of a quest he was on that took him to the top of the world's highest mountain.

He doesn't always want to do squiggles. All right, I admit, he almost never wants to do squiggles. It's my idea. I insist on ten minutes of squiggles after breakfast during the summer. And I insist that the stories be at least two sentences long. This is clearly my idea, but he doesn't fight me on it. Too much. Either he's learned that this is something I require and there's no point in fighting, or he actually enjoys it. Perhaps a little of both.

Sometimes his stories are the minimum two sentences, but sometimes he becomes carried away with excitement. I watch him, bent over his notebook, laboring to craft his story, and it warms my writerly heart.

There are practical, educational benefits as well. He's working on grammar and punctuation conventions. There is no doubt in his mind that "a lot" is two words, not one. He's even learning how to spell. After a story about a magic river that spanned eight days of squiggles (and counting), he no longer has to think about how to spell "magic" or "river."

But my favorite benefit of squiggles is reading them. I get a glimpse of his inner world, and an introduction to the characters that populate his imagination. Sometimes, as I draw the shape in his notebook for the next day's squiggles, I think, "Now, this is obviously a frog. He's going to make this into a frog. What else could it be?" But I am often surprised by his creations. He comes up with things I never would have imagined. It's a good reminder that he is his own person, with his own ideas.

After he finishes, I read his stories and write a sentence or two in response. Like any writer, he loves feedback, especially positive feedback. So I tell him my favorite parts of his stories and what my reactions are. The next time he sits down to his squiggle notebook, he immediately flips to see what I wrote to him. He reads my response and chuckles. And there we are, writing. Communicating.

Author Bio: Kira is a freelance writer and mother of three boys.