Q:
My son has quite a penchant for telling stories. His vocabulary is
amazing, not just for his age but for any adult! This is not just
motherly pride talking, he truly has a gift. I encourage him to write
but he tells me he hates to write. Any ideas on what I should do?

A:
Without speaking to your son, I have a couple of ideas. First of all,
you need to evaluate whether this “gift” is one your son wants to use
or is it one he wants to put up on a shelf somewhere? Many times,
parents notice a creativity or strength in their child and push them to
develop it further, only to create a resistance in the child. I
remember being forced to practice the piano and I hated it. I lost my
excitement for reading when I went to college and had loads of
assigned, what I thought boring, reading assignments. (Thankfully, I
found it again.) My husband was good at fixing cars and decided to do
it for a living, only to learn doing it for others took the joy out of
it.

So if you determine, this is more a
desire of yours rather than your son’s, then let it go. If you think he
might like to pursue it, you may suggest that he speak his stories into
a digital voice recorder and then you or someone else can transcribe them into
the written word. With today’s technology, if he uses an MP3 recorder,
he could even tell his stories and then burn them onto a CD that you
can listen to in the car and give out to friends and family as gifts.
Play to his strengths. I know many authors who speak their work and pay
to have it transcribed.

Please, let me know how this turns out. It’s an interesting situation. Thank you.