Writing as Play

In my author bio clips I often say that I'm a big kid who never stopped playing - words and ideas take up most (but certainly not all) of my play-space now. We are big on playing with words in my family. My husband is the quickest with the puns and groan-worthy 'dad jokes' but we all love a good word-joust. Board/card games like 'Apples to Apples' and 'Balderdash' and 'Man Bites Dog' have been some favourites with us.

 If we can show children that playing with words is just as much fun as other types of play, and writing is playing with words, and PLAY = FUN then we free them to enjoy creative writing - even the editing process which is just like re-arranging, substituting or eliminating blocks in a building creation.

In a guest blog post on the Melissa Writes Friday Five website, I mention 5 ways that writing is like playing with LEGO. In these days of writing on computers, it’s an easy concept for kids to visualise words, sentences and paragraphs as blocks to delete, cut and paste etc, – just like re-arranging LEGO bricks. Both forms of play are imaginative, whether you build with bricks or words – you have an idea in your head that you want to represent in a concrete form, and you manipulate elements (bricks or words) to do it. It’s fun – bringing form to the formless – in one case from a puddle of blocks on the floor, and in the other from fragments of ideas floating around inside your head. You can view the full 5 ways that writing is like playing with LEGO post here

And now to let you in on something I've been playing with lately. I've been tagged by the amazing Sandy Fussell in the 777 challenge - that is to post 7 lines from page 7 from a work in progress and then tag 7 others. As it is, my stories haven't yet reached 7 pages (being picture books or early readers) so I'll show you 7 lines from line 7 on the first page of my picture book manuscript - it's about boy called Victor: 

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Who knows - one day we might get to see it as a book?!
Now to tag 7 others - it's going to be hard because I know A LOT of people have already done this challenge. Let's try...
Melissa Gijsbers Khalinsky
Romi Sharp
Julie Grasso
Robert Vescio
Susan Day
Marian Mcguinness
Actually - is bad if only nominate 6? It's a nice number, I'll leave it at that  - links to these writer's websites are just a click on the name!