EDITOR’S NOTE: Well, what can I say about Michelle Klein? She is a roiling mass of intelligence, creativity and class, and her son is lucky to have her as a mother. Michelle has a couple of fantasy writing and gaming credits to her name, and she’s got an exciting comic book project in the works. Her strange attraction to Jaime Lannister (from George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series) nonwithstanding, we’re very pleased to have her contributing to The Bitter Quill.

Once upon a time there was a handsome prince who lived in a castle with his mother, the Lady of the Ink-Stained Hands. She posted her tale upon the Bitter Quill, and so it follows.

I’m getting to the point in my life where I can combine my greatest loves – literature and my child. I have the opportunity to watch him learn not only to read others’ words, but to tell his own stories and to come up with creative ideas. It’s fascinating to experience the fruits of a developing mind. Children have no boundaries. They don’t know all of the ‘rules’ that adults know – they don’t know they can’t fly or won’t be able to fly someday. They don’t know that they all won’t be rock stars or astronauts or firemen or presidents or monster-slaying heroes. Children are the most creative speculative fiction authors you’ll ever find.

So, how does one raise a writer? How does one encourage a child to tell the stories that live in his or her heart and mind? The stories are in there, even if the child can barely verbalize them. My father did it by telling me stories constantly. “When Daddy was a little girl and Mommy was a little boy and we rode on dinosaurs …” he would begin. He generated two results that way – one, I was always making up stories and either writing them down or telling them to the people around me, and two, I never believed that anything he said was true. The moon is not made of Gouda cheese and Prince Charming’s real name is not Irving Schwartz. How do I know? Mom told me.

When I wasn’t verifying things with Mom, however, I was writing. Stories, songs, poems, plays, journals. Now I’m starting to get my stories out into the world, but also I am telling them at home to my three year old son. It started as a method of parenting – it’s easier to get a reluctant child to do just about anything if you make up a story about it. If shampooing his hair will give him the magical powers to kill a dragon, suddenly he’s all for it, even if he normally despises getting his head wet. The more verbal he got, however, the more he asked me for “the story about the …”. At first he asked for stories I’d already told, then he’d just think of random objects and ask me to tell stories about them. An insistent three-year old demanding stories on the spot is a great stimulus for the creative process.

One day he asked me for “the story about the candle”. “I don’t know that one,” I said. “You tell it.” So he did. I had to prompt him with “then what happened?” a number of times, but he told his own story at three years old. He started it with ‘Once upon a time’ and ended it with ‘and they lived happily ever after. The End’. As much as I would like to chalk it up to the amazing prodigy that is my son, the truth is that all kids have the ability to write fiction and the more you encourage storytelling, the more they’ll do it. All they need is a listening ear and a sense of what a story is, which they’ll get from having stories told to them and read to them.

Read to them, tell them stories, ask them for the stories in their heads - that is my advice on the raising of writers. My own writing process currently is a dual exploration – my own creativity and my son’s. We inspire each other. We checked it out with Grandmom, so we know the moon is not made of Gouda cheese … but we pretend that it is anyway.

And they lived happily ever after. The end.