What It Means to Be a Young Person Writing
- Hannah Ahn
- May 10
- 4 min read
Updated: Jun 23
The nature of writing, and the nature of being young.
When I think of young people writing, I return often to the movie “The Kindergarten Teacher”, starring Maggie Gyllenhaal. It’s a story, briefly summarized, about a small kindergartener who writes astonishing poetry. The poems in the film are thought to be good because there is nothing quite like them- they cut deep to the core of human pathos and leave much older, jaded adults stuck on a few words or a turn of phrase, unable to shake the feeling of those words out of their monkey brains. When you read a kindergarten’s poetry, lost is the sense of envy or grudging satisfaction and respect you might yield to an adult colleague’s work, when you read a sentence strangled out of a paragraph referencing a setup that had been carefully constructed eighteen pages ago. No, the writing of children is all wonder and bated breath. It relies on magic tricks- not consistency.
There is something fundamentally correct at the core of the movie, which predicates itself on the magic of the little boy’s poetry and the various ways that the adults around him react to his gift. Young people do make much more interesting art than adults. Not necessarily better, if better can be quantified by better adjective placement or a more skillful understanding of subtext or more complex themes or whatever meaningless, fluid criteria it is that we ascribe the adjective of “goodness” to. But certainly much more interesting. Other writers have articulated this feeling much more eloquently and better than I have- linked below is a Poetry Foundation article going over this same subject with a writer who worked in classrooms of fourth-graders writing poetry. But maybe the whole point is that eloquence is no longer the relevant thing. Adults spend a lot of time trying to describe what it is that the poetry means to them in “The Kindergarten Teacher”, but they fall inevitably short, because you do not need to understand art to know when it is good. Whatever we can say about the nature of children’s writing will never be as startling or as revolutionary as the actual writing.
Some people might say good art comes from a familiarity with the world that can only be gained through time and undergoing certain rituals of personhood- that you become baptized as a human only by fully understanding the world around you, and experiencing a good deal of what it has to offer. In some respects, I’m inclined to agree. Many of the writers I love are familiar with the world- and jaded by it. Reading them feels like handing off your own thoughts about the world to a much more cultivated, seasoned wilderness expert guiding you through a scary, bomb-littered terrain. But there’s a point where insincerity and turns of phrase and delight at your own cleverness and cynicism can only get you so far. Young writers, then, can reimagine the world as what it should be, rather than what it is. Or, in other words, they simply see, and feel in the most raw senses of the words. Children are astonished with the world in a way that adults seem to end up forgetting. They have their own language and vocabulary for the world- and they operate on entirely different artistic terms than adults. Maybe because they are not thinking, as older people so often do, of the right thing to say. The requests of children are plainspoken, their desires clear. They have not yet learned the language of existing as a human- in other words, they are not acquainted with social structures or bartering or disguise, how to blend amongst your peers, the things you are not supposed to say, the things you are. They are not thinking of ways to trick other people or be tricked.
That’s why I created this website, above all. Because nobody can really be taught to write. They can be guided and molded and given various influences, but writing starts from the root of self and stretches beyond. To define the nature of writing and where ideas come from would be like trying to define the act of consciousness itself. It is a circular and pointless task, because I can read something and know it is good the same way a blind man knows when he is facing the sun. Hopefully, in any case, the advice on this website is constructive, but not stilting. That it can encourage instead of limit, and enlighten instead of enforce. The rule is that there are no rules, and the truth is that there is no truth. That is the only absolute I can give you, and I hope you too choose to take everything listed here with a grain of salt, incurring only that which is useful for your own growth and development, and discarding the rest.
Above all, I believe young people should write because I believe we should all find ways of expressing ourselves that are meaningful and more thoughtful in an age of instant gratification, and can do some good in the real world. Art, especially writing, fulfills the above prerequisites. But at the same time, the delight of children writing is that they subvert this expectation by not taking themselves seriously. They themselves, the way they view the world, being the art, being the magic trick. The output and the vessel are not separate. You are not a writer until you write, and once you begin, you will be a writer forever. All that is asked of you is utter, hopeless devotion.
Now, I do hope to never lose this sense of child-like sincerity, in both my writing and my personal life, as time passes and I encounter more work, more points of view. I hope things remain as simple and infinitely complex as they do to a four-year-old crayoning a haiku or a sixteen-year-old girl embarking on the first line of a short story. If only because this way of life seems to deliver happiness that concerns a world much bigger than writing.
Resources:
Hannah Gamble’s “The Average Fourth Grader Is a Better Poet Than You (and Me Too)
