A Different Kind of Book Review: PocketDoodles for Young Artists

Post #54 – Women’s Memoirs, Book Raves – Kendra Bonnett and Matilda Butler

This week is an exception. As you know, we review memoirs written by women. I receive notices of many books because publicists are aware of the following of our website. I turn down most of the offers for free books because they fall outside the scope of Women’s Memoirs. However, with summer here and visions of children and grandchildren with time on their hands, I was intrigued by a new book, Pocketdoodles for Young Artists.

Early Nourishment for Memoir Writing

Today’s mail brought my copy and PocketDoodles offers just the potential I was hoping for. Most of us begin to think about memoir writing sometime when we’re north of 50. It’s true that a number of important memoirs have been written by young women and there certainly is no age litmus test for writing a life story. However, unless writing is your profession, we’re usually too busy with careers and raising families to consider writing a memoir when we are young.

This means that by the time we’re interested in writing, we find we haven’t had much practice. If you are a parent with a young child or a grandparent sharing part of your summer with your grandchildren, you could consider giving them the gift of memoir writing. What fun, creative exercises might you and your young one do that could instill an interest in writing?

Pocketdoodles for Young Artists, while emphasizing the drawing part of doodling, offers many opportunities for a child to get involved in writing. For example, one page shows two men on a park bench with empty bubbles over their heads. At the bottom of the page is the question, “What are they saying?” Here’s a fun way for a child to begin to think about the craft of dialogue, an important element in memoir writing. Similarly, another page shows an artist and his mostly completed painting, again with the empty bubbles above each head. The text says, “Leonardo da Vinci painted the Mona Lisa. What are they talking about?”

One page shows an intriguing scene. On the adjacent page, the text is: “Now Write Your Story.” Beginning to think about scenes as stories will be a useful tool later and may start to engender an interest in writing.

Pocketdoodles for Young Artists is clever and well done. I think children (the back of the book says ages 6 and up) will have fun with these artistic exercises.

The copyright indicates the book will be published in September, 2010. However, I checked Amazon’s listing and it says the book is in stock. I think it would be a great summer gift for the budding memoirist/artist in your family.

At $9.99, Pocketdoodles for Young Artists is a reasonable investment for hours of fun and writing/drawing opportunities. However, I’m all too aware how the economy means that many of us need to carefully consider each of our purchases. If you don’t think you have the extra resources, I urge you to still consider how you might get youngsters in your family to start writing. Perhaps you would make a journal together and then think of excursions that will give her something to write about. Perhaps you might draw a scene and have him write a story about it. You could even have three scenes — a beginning, a middle, an ending — so that your future memoirist understands that a story has all three. Perhaps you’ll draw two people (or animals) and put a bubble over each head. Then let your child or grandchild create dialogue. There are a number of creative ways to get children to see the joy in writing.

Meanwhile, be sure to keep up your writing habit during the summer. Don’t have the habit yet? We suggest you use the weekly writing prompt on this site as your writing warm up exercise. In case you missed them, here are links to three prompts by Promptly Portland that we especially like:

— Snow peas and emotional support

— Quick release stories

— Our pets and lessons learned

memoir
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craft of writing

Tagged as: craft of memoir writing, Writing habit, Writing Prompts