Christmas present query

[rivka]

What would you get a twelve-year-old girl who wants to be a writer?

I think we gave her a blank book last year. (Not because we knew that she was an aspiring author at that point, just because we got lucky. Or maybe that's why she now wants to be an author.)

There are a lot of books about writing aimed at kids and teenagers, but I have no idea of their quality.

There's also this writing journal, which, while not for kids, was recommended on Amazon by a young woman who describes herself as a "13-year-old writer."

Any recommendations?

Comments

[papersky.livejournal.com]

How to write books make some people (me) paralysed and unable to write, and if someone had given me them for Christmas when I was 12 and wanted to be a writer, I'd have seen it as horribly patronizing of them, especially if it was prescriptive stuff. Let her buy The Elements of Style herself if she wants it -- goodness knows I never have.

And what you write when you're 12 is going to be crap anyway, and trying to write crap to someone's prescriptive style isn't going to help you get onto the good stuff any sooner. What a 12 year old who wants to be a writer needs isn't a pen (a pen? in 2004?) or a how-to book, she needs to be setting down the wide layers of reading.

My suggestions would be books written by people who used to be twelve year olds who wanted to be writers and fulfilled their ambitions. That's not just me, but actually most writers. How about Pamela Dean's Secret Country books? Or Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel. Or maybe a really good biography of a writer, like Claire Tomalin's Jane Austen biography, or Margaret Forster's Daphne Du Maurier one.

Or how about a book token -- urm, do you have book tokens in the US? Or a specific token for a big box bookstore near her, or for Amazon -- though Amazon won't accept tokens unless you give them a credit card number as well, so less useful.

Ah, booktokens, how much joy they gave me, how wonderful I thought them because they represented not just a potential book but a trip to a really big bookshop and money to spend in it on the things I really wanted to buy. (Lears in Cardiff, the Mecca of my childhood bookshopping, closed down entirely the week I emigrated.)

I second this!

[dakiwiboid.livejournal.com]

She definitely needs to read and read and read. Gift cards are good (our equivalent to book tokens). The blank book suggestion is good, but not pretty ones--the bound exercise books are nice, but get little enough ones to fit in a backpack, and make them small the ones with hard covers. Give her a huge pack of eraseable pens, too.

I'd like to recommedn a book as well, Dodie Smith's I Capture The Castle, which is old, but really captures the mindset well of a young woman who wants to be a writer.

Re: I second this!

[uilos.livejournal.com]

I Capture the Castle is a great book. It's one of my comfort books and entirely appropriate for this situation.