Writing with a Kindergartener

This year, I have the pleasure of participating, not only in my 10th NaNoWriMo event, but also doing so alongside my five-year-old daughter. She's always been imaginative, but previously wasn't able to sit still long enough to participate. Now, though, my big kindergartener is ready for the Young Writers Program!

I set up a camera for her, and she tells me her story, in all its rambling, slightly incoherent glory. I finally (as of today) wrote more than she did, but she's been steadily skunking me in word count!

It has been so incredible to see my own daughter take to writing the way I've always hoped at least one of my kids would. I guess it was inevitable. I did fail NaNoWriMo 2005 because I had her on November 16th (I still got 18K that year, though!), so she was born into the madness. It was natural that she should eventually join it. Yesterday, she thrilled me even more by joining me at a write-in, and asking me to help her write more of her story by herself. She drew her pictures, and then told me what she wanted to write. I wrote the sentence down, and she faithfully transcribed it. I didn't correct her grammar.

She's got such a fertile imagination! Her story is so much fun. It's about a little unicorn who's afraid of lightning. She's also got a little blue cat who's afraid of heights, there's a trip to Australia, and they live in a bamboo forest. Her working title is The Little Unicorn.

One of her best lines so far is actually the inspiration for my own novel.  She's describing the unicorn's little sister:

"And she also is the same color of Mozart. She is white and orange just like Mozart."

In this case, Mozart is actually our cat, a marmalade longhair lump of fur. But that line has become so much more!

It triggered the start of my new novel. I'd written about 900 words on my original idea (a retelling of J. Sheridan Lefanu's pre-Dracula novel Carmilla), but was going nowhere. One of my local Wrimos mentioned "Hey, 'The Color of Mozart'… That would make a great title for a novel!"

And you know something? She was right! Those four little words have started me down the path to my own, very new novel.  I started all over, and have a great new idea that's providing me with the potential for much more fertile plot ideas.

I'm still having trouble finding the time to write, but it has been so much fun to transcribe my daughter's work in all its unedited glory.

Now I have dreams of spending the next ten years writing with my daughter. Maybe it's wishful thinking on my part, but a girl can dream, right?

I'll admit that I know it's possible; there's one family in our local group who does it together. The oldest daughter started it, and got her mom into it. Then her dad, and now that the oldest has moved on to college, the youngest child has started too. Is it wrong of me to hope for the same thing?

Have any of you ever done NaNoWriMo with a child or another family member?

– Heather Dudley