I Asked An 11 Year Old to Write My Blog Post

A few years ago I asked my friend’s eight year old daughter to write a blog post for me. She happily obliged and opted to write a short story. I was able to talk her through a little story writing process and we worked on proper formatting for dialogue and paragraphs. I had a lot of fun and I was hoping she’d eventually be up for doing it again.

Well now she’s eleven and I asked her if she’d be willing to write me a blog post for this week. She agreed and chose to write a story again! We flipped through a few of my writing prompt books and she settled on this sentence as her prompt: “She smiled in the kind of way that meant you knew she was up to something.”

The process was similar to what I remember doing with her a couple years ago. She needed a little bit to help start. I asked her some questions to get her thinking about the story but she was off and running pretty fast.

I absolutely love this and I love listening to her consider different ideas and character traits. It’s funny because I see so many of the typical creative writer traits in her. She overthinks different aspects of the story and spent a lot of time figuring out sentences before she’d actually type anything out. I hope that she continues to grow in her storytelling. I’d love to help her through writing many more ideas. In the meantime though, here is her story. I did a couple of very minor edits, just for spelling, but it is otherwise pure eleven-year-old imagination.  

Mckenzie got home and went to her room.  When she got to her room, she saw something of hers was missing and she knew it had to be her roommate, who had taken it.

As Mckenzie walked out of her room, she stopped at the kitchen to get a butcher knife. She found the weight of the knife very familiar. She turned off all the lights and went to the living room to wait for her roommate, Danielle. An hour later she hears a car engine shut off, she looked out the window and saw Danielle getting out of the car. She heard Danielle walking down the hallway to the dorm. Danielle got her keys out of her perse and unlocked the door walking in seeing the apartment dark as can be. She felt in the dark for the light switch.

“Well, well, well” Mckenzie smirked. “What have you been up to?” Mckenzie said.

“Uhm I’ve been hanging out with friends got a problem?” Danielle said.

“Actually yes, yes I do have a problem with that.” Mckenzie said.

“OH MY GOSH Mckenzie spit out your stupid problem!!” Danielle said.

“You want to know my problem I will give you, my problem.” She said as she pulled the knife out. “My problem is why do you have a picture of me and Olivia hanging on your purse with X’s on my EYES?” Mckenzie said.

“Mckenzie… not need to get violent it- it was a joke…” Danielle said as she was terrified.

“Blah, blah, blah” Mckenzie said. “I’m tired of your stupid jokes” she said as she got up

“Well I think its time for you to go…. Friend…” Mckenzie said.

“WAIT Mckenzie I think I can pay you back for this please.” Danielle said.

“To late love <3. “Mckenzie Smirked.

Mckenzie would attack Danielle and blood would go everywhere. She cut open Danielle and let her spider’s and snakes out to feast on her lungs. She went to bed like nothing happened. The next day she woke up and got some of the blood left over and put it on her hands making everything in the house look messed up like a robbery happened and Danielle got killed. She also put lipstick on the mirror saying We are coming back 😊. She called the police.

“HELLO HELLO I NEED HELP!!” Mckenzie said.

“Madam I need you to calm down and tell me what’s wrong.” Police said.

“I NEED POLICE HERE MY FRIEND IS DEAD ON THE FLOOR!!” Mckenzie said.

“Okay I need your address.” Police said.

“********* Street” Mckenzie said acting like she was panicking.

“I got some police on the way.” “Police said.

“PLEASE HURRY.” Mckenzie said”

She would wait for the police as she heard the sirens. She started to try to fake cry and she made it happen.

“Madam are you okay? Police said.

“Ye-yes I think I am.” Mckenzie said.

“Did you get a good glimpse of the robbers?” Police asked

“No, I didn’t I got home, and she was lying on the floor…” Mckenzie said.

“Okay, We will get you friend to the hospital.”

“Stay safe ma’am” Police said.

“You to sir.” Mckenzie would turn around and smirk. “Ah yes my plan worked again I am the best killer in the city” Mckenzie said

I love this. It’s such a great, simple story of revenge and it made me laugh. I think my favorite part is where she added in an emoji that she told me, in no uncertain terms, that it HAD to stay in the story. Apparently the narrative hinges upon it.

It was super fun getting her started and then just seeing where she took it. She reminded me of myself when I was first starting to write which was lovely and nostalgic. Let me know your favorite part of the story, I’m sure the author would love to hear what you liked best!

Plagiarism as a Child

I’ve been writing for as long as I can remember. I still have a lot of my old writing and sometimes I look at it and think about how absolutely stupid it is far I’ve come now. I also realize how much I used to plagiarize.

Plagiarism is taking someone else’s work and passing it off as your own. Sure, there’s cheating in school but young kids don’t think about that as plagiarism. I never really thought about it, especially since I was homeschooled; cheating wasn’t much of an option when I was the only one in my grade. But that didn’t stop me from copying a lot of published authors.

I devoured books as a child. I read constantly. All the way through high school I always had a book in my hands. I read things I liked and, in turn, wrote things that I liked. Sometimes, those two things looked a little too similar. I would read a book about a dragon rider and then turn around and write a story about a dragon rider. I would read about a child with magical abilities and then turn around and write a story about a child with magical abilities. Sure, the names would be changed and sometimes I’d make the dragon purple instead of blue, but in the end, I was just rewriting someone else’s book thinking it was mine.

It’s not uncommon for kids to do this. I was talking to my best friend who mentioned finding a story she had plagiarized as a kid. She said that she had clearly just changed a few names and written the same story she’d been reading at the time. This kind of thing obviously wouldn’t be something we’d do now, because plagiarism is serious and bad and we know that more acutely than we did as children but it’s really interesting to see how we did it as kids. Both of us would change names (I only had like five names I used, shout out to anyone named Michael) and make minor changes (like the color of the dragon) but we borrowed a lot of plots. We just wanted to write well and these authors were our examples and inspiration. We wanted to sound like professional authors.

As I got a little older, I realized that when I was copying things, I wasn’t as focused on copying plots as I was focused on copying the author’s voice. When I liked the way an author wrote, I would plagiarize their work (imitation is the sincerest form of flattery I hope) trying to make it mine. I would use their vocabulary and try to make it sound like them. In doing so, I started to develop my own writing voice.

If you’re not familiar with the idea of voice in writing, it’s essentially how someone writes. Voice is everything about the feel an author gives. It’s what makes an author unique and helps them stand out. If you have a favorite author, I bet I could line up three or four different paragraphs from their peers and one from them, and you could pick out the one your author wrote. That’s what voice comes down to. How an author speaks into the story. It’s the culmination of every part of the author’s writing.

So when I was taking other people’s work, what I was really trying to steal was their voice (like a freaking sea witch in a Disney movie or something). I wanted my writing to sound like them because I liked the way they sounded. This really helped me in my own work. Even today, I sometimes find myself mimicking an author I just read. If I recently read a historical fiction book then my work tends toward poetic and flowery. If I recently read a science fiction book then my own work will lean toward technical and straightforward. It’s actually really fun for me to look at some of my stories and remember what I was reading at the time I had also been writing.

I am far beyond plagiarizing these days. Everyone should be, by the time they reach the end of high school. At this point, I can recognize when I’m using a little too much of someone else’s ideas or voice and I can correct it. It really is about practice to get to your own writing voice and style. I can see a few quirks have hung around since my younger writing days and I don’t mind them as much as I used to. I thought I’d really developed my end-all-be-all writing voice by the end of college but this blog has certainly kept me going.

Do you write? Did you also plagiarize as a kid? I hope me and Charlotte aren’t totally alone in this early writer’s trait! Let me know your thoughts in the comments!

How Did You Not Know That? The Flip Side

Last week, I wrote about being understanding of people with different life experiences. If someone doesn’t know a little piece of trivia or a certain “life hack” that you’ve personally known more than half your life, they’re not stupid. They have lived a different life with different needs and modes of learning.

Right before I posted that, a thought came to me about the flip side of that idea. Because, yeah, a person isn’t stupid for not knowing a thing they never needed/were never taught. But there are definitely times that people are willfully ignorant and its truly their own fault for not knowing something.

The stuff people don’t know, that I can’t believe they don’t know, are usually not things that you would sit down and learn in a classroom. They’re nearly always logical conclusions that a person has simply failed to consider. Not making a logical jump still doesn’t make you stupid. There are plenty of times when I’ve found myself very suddenly making a connection from an angle I’d never considered. Or I make a really stupid connection that doesn’t make any sense at all once I spend another 3 seconds thinking about it. It, more or less, depends on the logical jump that you haven’t made yet.

Reasonable jumps that just hadn’t been considered before are simple enough. I mentioned a quote from G. Michael Hopf the other day at work, “Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times.” I brought it up to talk about the cyclical nature of society and government and culture. I don’t remember exactly why I brought it up but the quote is something I’d heard at least a few times before. I credit it to Hopf but I have a feeling the idea has existed in history and philosophy for a while.

My coworker listened to me speak briefly about the quote and what it means and she said she hadn’t thought about things that way before. Which is perfectly reasonable. I’ve taken college level philosophy and logic classes and my dad has always been into logic and bigger picture things. My coworker had all the pieces of the bigger picture, but hadn’t put them all together yet because she never needed to.

But there are people who are just being stupid and I wonder if it’s on purpose. To get the best examples of these people, I turned to the internet. From people who don’t know what that regular maps existed before Google maps to people who think that putting literal bleach on your teeth to whiten them, there are people who are so stupid I wonder how they made it to adulthood.

Both of those examples show a lack of logical understanding. These people don’t think these things because they were told them. They think these things because they didn’t use their critical thinking skills (if they even have any) to consider anything beyond the most basic implication of the thought.

Google maps exists.

Everyone uses Google maps for navigation.

No navigation existed before Google maps.

This person clearly didn’t develop this logical leap very well because it lacks, well, actual logic. They can’t fathom something existing before they themselves started existing. Their world view and bubble of knowledge doesn’t reach very far outside themselves and it shows. Because they’re really dumb. Or at the very least being dumb in this moment. Maybe they’re very smart usually and just had a moment. I kind of doubt it.

I don’t think I really considered how many people lack basic critical thinking skills until I started working retail. Sure, in high school you’d come across some dumb kids, but usually you’d give them the benefit of the doubt and expect them to get smarter over time. In college there were a few too, but again, you figured they would level out over time. They were getting a degree after all, they can’t be THAT stupid, right? Well, now I work retail and I encounter way too many adults who don’t know anything at all and who don’t seem to be trying to know anything either.

When kids are stupid and don’t think critically, you can correct them. They generally take that correction and use it. Because kids just want to fit in and are still learning. They little sponges that want to understand. When adults are stupid and don’t think critically, they don’t want correction. They think they’re totally right and that you are the one in the wrong. Even when you prove them wrong, they often won’t listen. Because they’re adults, they know what they’re doing. They don’t need you to tell them what they know, even when they don’t know anything.

Life is hard, it’s harder if you’re stupid. But don’t tell some people that.

I Am Unimpressed

I’m not really an experience-focused kind of person. By that, I mean I don’t necessarily care about going to big events or landmarks or things like that. I’m completely uninterested in visiting the Grand Canyon or flying in an airplane or going to concerts or “seeing the sights” or mostly anything else. Of course, there are a few exceptions to this, like I’m always down for a hypnotist or magic show because those are awesome. But even those are things I wouldn’t go out of my way to attend. And of course I sometimes want to get out of the house to hang out with friends. But as a general rule, I’m not into going to things.

This week, my sister took me and our friend’s two kids to the zoo. I was invited to basically be a second babysitter more than anything else. When she asked me if I wanted to go, I did not want to go. But because she needed me (and was going to pay for me), I said yes. So we were off with an 8 year old and 3 year old for a fun-filled day at the zoo.

We headed to the polar bears first. I was unimpressed. I mean, it’s a bear. Cool. I see these in books and on movies all the time. I like learning about polar bears and watching documentaries but seeing it just wasn’t that cool. Maybe it was just my generally high apathy level or my over-confidence in the 6-8 inches of acrylic plastic between me and the 1200lb wild animal that kept me from being in awe. Honestly, if I couldn’t be impressed with this polar bear then I wasn’t sure anything in the zoo was going to impress me. I definitely faked some excitement for the sake of the kids. (I didn’t want them to follow my example to become boring, jaded, apathetic human beings who don’t get excited for anything.) So that kind of helped me be a little open to seeing these animals with new, less adult, eyes.

We made it through the aquarium and most of the zoo and it was fun. It was cool seeing the kids reactions and to help them learn a little more about these creatures that share this planet with us. Watching kids experience things that we adults find mundane is like experiencing the thing all over again. Which is cool. Except I’ve been quite apathetic for a large portion of my life, so seeing and experiencing some of those feelings again doesn’t make it all the way through to my heart of stone.

I figured the whole day would be like that. But I was wrong.

If I wrote a list of what I consider the least exotic animals, they would all be savanna animals. Lions, elephants, giraffes, zebras, gazelle, etc. Absolutely nothing wrong with liking these animals. I like them. But I would say that these animals are often the most overused in books and on tv shows and games and everything. Kids’ stuff especially has these animals all over shirts, blankets, and toys. Even in kid’s bedrooms or classrooms or playrooms, they’re put on posters or painted on walls. They’re cool, but they’re the group I would consider the most mundane of the exotic.

So color me surprised when we got to the savanna animals and I actually got pretty excited. I was so blindsided by the feelings because they were so genuine. I really enjoyed watching the elephants and giraffes and ostrich and we could kind of see the zebras but they were mostly out of view.

Weird, right? Like, why am I so excited to see these animals that I don’t even consider exciting? Why do I feel so weirdly connected to this particular group? I’ve gone through the whole zoo with barely restrained apathy and now I suddenly really care? Why?

I’ll tell you why.

Zoo Tycoon.

Hear me out before you start laughing too hard. Zoo Tycoon is an old PC game (I’m partial to the original 2001 game) where you build and run a virtual zoo. Super fun. My siblings and I played it CONSTANTLY growing up. At first, we just threw things together and played without restraint. But we slowly learned how to better make our animals happy and how to manage the funds for the zoo so we didn’t go broke every five minutes. Each animal has habitat requirements and also has a few paragraphs about its real life counterpart. If you want to make your zoo the best for your animals and guests then you have to learn about the real life animals.

What does that have to do with my sudden affection for savanna animals specifically? Well, in the game, those are the first animals that you have access to. You have to wait a year (in game time, about an hour of play) for all the animals and objects to be unlocked. So those are the animals I spent the most time with in the game. They’re the ones I would have from the very start to the very end of any zoo I built. They’re the first ones I spent time reading about in order to make their virtual lives better. Lions, zebras, and gazelles were always part of my basic zoo package.

I think that’s what really made me care about these animals. I’m partial to cats but the jaguar we saw earlier actually annoyed me because I remembered that in Zoo Tycoon it was the literal worst animal because it was NEVER happy. So this educational PC game shaped my feelings for real life animals.

Weird but true. I didn’t think that Zoo Tycoon was changing me as a person. I’m not sure what I’ll do with this realization. For now, I’ll be happy to have had those feelings of excitement and connection, a small reminder of the wonders of childhood and experiencing a zoo for the first time.

Like It or Not, You Are Your Pet’s Parent

I do not call myself my cat’s ‘mom’ or ‘furmom’ as some these days identify. I don’t consider my pet a person or anything like that. I did not birth this animal. I did not adopt through a process that would require me to make sure my entire life and home will be tailored specifically to the care of this animal (I don’t know the entire adoption process for children but I’m gonna go out on a limb and say it’s a lot more intensive than getting a cat).

But I am still my cat’s parent.

“What?” You might ask. “How can you say you’re not a pet parent yet say you are a pet parent?”

What does a parent do for their child? They love, feed, teach, admonish, and encourage. They make sure they’re eating properly, they take them to the doctor when they’re sick, they correct negative behavior, and when the child is young or nonverbal, they have to be in tune with every aspect of the child’s life to keep them healthy. Parents have to use tough love sometimes in order to keep their child safe, they have to get good care for the kid when they can’t take care of them for a time. There’s a lot more but I’ll stop there.

What does a pet owner do for their pet? They love, feed, teach, correct, and encourage. They make sure they’re eating properly, they take them to the vet when they’re sick, they have to use tough love sometimes in order to keep them safe. They have to find good care when they can’t take care of them for a time. They have to be in tune with every aspect of the pet’s life to keep them healthy.

See some similarities? The difference being that most children grow up and are able to tell parents what’s going on. My cat can’t tell me how her day was like a teenager can. An animal is voiceless. They cannot tell you where they are hurt, they cannot tell you why they’re acting out, they can’t point out their abuser, they can’t talk out their stress, etc. The only one who can speak for your pet is you. You have to know your pet. You have to understand what their actions mean. You have to tell the vet what’s been going on in their life. You have to make judgments based on what is best for them without knowing if they like those choices or not.

There’s a cheesy quote out there about how your pet may be only one part of your world but you are your pet’s entire world. It’s usually painted over a picture of an adorable puppy or kitten to tug at your heart strings. Despite the emotional ploy to get you to share/like, this quote is true. My cat knows nothing beyond me and my family. She doesn’t have connections outside this house. She can’t choose to leave. She didn’t come here because she wanted to. This is the only world she knows. How can I willingly choose to hurt or abandon her? She can’t call the police on me, she can’t talk to friends about the care she’s receiving. And why would she? I feed her and love her and she seems happy with that. I know she’s happy because I pay attention to her. I spend time with her. Animals have relationships with their owners just as people have relationships with each other.

Committing to care for the life another living creature is a big thing. It’s not something that you should ever choose on a whim. A cat is a 12 to 18 year commitment and a dog is similar depending on the breed. That is literally like having a child. If you’re not ready to take care of an animal for the rest of its life, don’t get one.

If I am no longer able to care for my cat then it is my responsibility to make sure she is still cared for. If I knew I wouldn’t be able to take care of her for more than the next few months and I spent that time deliberating over whether or not to take her to a shelter, she wouldn’t know. I can prepare myself for that day. I can make myself feel better about the decision. I can say goodbye. She can’t. I am her whole world and when I walk into that shelter all she knows is that it’s a new, loud, scary place with people she doesn’t know and strange animal smells everywhere. She would look to me for security and safety in this new place but suddenly I’m not there. (I understand that circumstances change but at the same time I feel like it can be an excuse to drop animals off at shelters. Find a new home yourself, where you can keep in touch with the new owners to make sure the animal is well cared for.)

Do you remember when you were six and lost sight of your parent in the grocery store? Can you recall that moment of total panic while a million horrible scenarios ran through your mind? Multiply that by ten and perhaps you will feel what an animal feels when suddenly the person who was supposed to be there, the ONLY person they have known for most of their life, leaves them with no explanation.

I am not against people finding new homes for pets they can absolutely no longer care for. But I think that people should be more responsible in the first place. An animal is a commitment, not a fling.  It’s a long term relationship. It’s not having a child, but it’s like having a child. You are responsible for that animal. Whether you like it or not, you are that pet’s parent, their only voice in this world. Act like it.