Encourage a Young Writer Day: The Adult Who Read the Pages

April 10 is Encourage a Young Writer Day. The observance asks adults to do something small: read a kid’s story, answer a teenager’s poem, hand over a notebook, and take the pages seriously enough to say what works. That last part is harder than it sounds.

Most young writers don’t stop for lack of talent. They stop because the first people who saw the work ignored it, or praised it so vaguely that the praise meant nothing.

The history of literature is crowded with books written by people too young to vote, and Frankenstein, The Outsiders, Anne Frank’s diary and the tiny handmade books of the Brontë children all came out of teenage or younger hands. Look at each one closely and the same pattern shows up. Somebody older did one concrete thing at the right moment, and the work survived because of it.

Who founded the April 10 observance for young writers?

Nobody seems to know.

National Day Calendar lists it every April 10 and admits it’s still researching the origins. No organization claims it and no proclamation explains the date. Schools and libraries have picked it up anyway, mostly as a hook for classroom prompts.

That’s fine. A day with no author belongs to whoever uses it, and the use that matters is a grown-up sitting down with a young person’s pages.

How old was Mary Shelley when she started Frankenstein?

Eighteen.

In June 1816 she was still Mary Godwin, living near Lake Geneva with Percy Shelley, and the weather that summer was bad enough to keep everyone indoors at Lord Byron’s villa. Byron proposed that each of them write a ghost story. The company was Byron, Percy Shelley, Byron’s physician John Polidori and Mary. She planned a short story. Percy pushed her to turn it into a novel, and it came out anonymously in London on January 1, 1818, in three volumes and an edition of 500 copies. She was twenty.

Her name didn’t appear on it until a French translation in 1821.

The encouragement in that story is easy to miss because the setting is so famous. Byron’s contest gave her a deadline and an audience of working writers who expected a finished story. Percy’s push gave her permission to make the thing bigger than she’d planned. Neither one wrote a word of it for her. I’ve covered the novel itself on Frankenstein Day, and the point here is narrower. An eighteen-year-old got a real assignment from people who assumed she’d finish it.

How did S.E. Hinton write The Outsiders in high school?

She wrote about the hallway she walked down every day.

Susan Eloise Hinton was a student at Will Rogers High School in Tulsa, Oklahoma, when she wrote it, and Viking Press published it in 1967. The school had two rival crowds, the greasers and the Socs, and she wanted readers to see the greasers from the inside. A teenager looked at a social war going on around her and decided the adults writing books for teenagers had missed it, and she was right.

Her publisher suggested she go by her initials so male reviewers wouldn’t dismiss a novel about gang boys because a girl wrote it. She kept the initials for good. The book has sold more than 14 million copies, and Viking said in 2017 it was still selling more than 500,000 a year.

The lesson for a parent or teacher is short. Hinton didn’t need a grand subject. She had access nobody else had, and a publisher who treated that access as valuable.

What did the Brontë children write before Jane Eyre?

Whole countries.

On June 5, 1826, Patrick Brontë gave his son Branwell a set of twelve wooden soldiers. The children each claimed one and started inventing lives for them. By December 1827 the game had become the Glass Town Confederacy, an imaginary nation with an island for each sibling. Emily and Anne later broke away to build their own world, Gondal, and Charlotte and Branwell grew Glass Town into a kingdom called Angria. They kept at it for years.

Charlotte and Branwell hand-bound some of it into miniature books around 1829 and 1830, each about 2.5 by 5 centimeters. The gift was twelve toys. Patrick didn’t assign anything or grade anything, and the result was the apprenticeship behind Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights.

How did Christopher Paolini get Eragon published?

Through his parents first, and through a stranger’s stepson second.

Paolini was homeschooled and finished high school at fifteen through correspondence courses. He started Eragon around then, wrote a draft by hand in about a year, spent another year rewriting it and another year editing. (See my review of Eragon) Only then did his parents read the finished manuscript and publish it through their small home-based company, Paolini International. The family toured it. Paolini gave more than 135 talks at schools, libraries and bookstores, dressed in a medieval costume of red shirt and lace-up boots. The book drew little attention. He’s described that stretch as stressful.

In mid-2002 the novelist Carl Hiaasen’s stepson found a copy in a bookstore and liked it. Hiaasen took it to his own publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, and Knopf released a new edition in August 2003. Paolini was a New York Times bestselling author at nineteen, and in 2011 Guinness World Records named him the youngest author of a bestselling book series.

Few families can do what the Paolinis did, and nobody should take the costume tour as the model. The useful part is the editing. His parents didn’t publish the first draft. They waited through two more years of revision.

Why did Anne Frank rewrite her own diary?

Because a voice on the radio told her the record would be wanted.

She got the diary for her thirteenth birthday, June 12, 1942, and picked it out herself in a bookshop. Weeks later the family hid in Amsterdam. On March 28, 1944, Gerrit Bolkestein, a minister in the Dutch government in exile, called on Radio Oranje for people to keep diaries and letters from the occupation. After that appeal she planned a book. Over the next four months she rewrote much of the diary, gave the people in it pseudonyms and shaped the entries as letters to Kitty. She was arrested on August 4, 1944.

She died at Bergen-Belsen in February or March 1945. She was fifteen.

Her father, Otto, published the diary in 1947 as Het Achterhuis, working from both her original and her revision, and it has since been translated into more than 70 languages. A writer reading that history should notice the revision. Anne Frank wasn’t only a girl keeping a diary. She was a writer editing a manuscript, and in an April 1944 entry she wrote that she wanted to become a journalist. One public statement that ordinary records mattered turned a private notebook into a deliberate book.

What can a teenager’s interview with a grandfather turn into?

In my case, a book that took decades to finish.

At seventeen I interviewed my grandfather about the Second World War. He’d been a prisoner of war. The final version of that book, Behind the Wire, was written in 2025, and without that interview there’d be no book.

I didn’t know at seventeen what I had. A teenager with a list of questions and a willing grandparent is collecting material that can’t be gathered later, because the people who can answer those questions don’t stay. If you know a young person who wants to write, the most useful assignment you can give is an interview with the oldest relative who’ll sit for one. The page on interviewing your own parent or grandparent covers how to run it, and a teenager can follow the same steps an adult would.

My other early project went the opposite way. Around 1987 and 1988 I spent a year hand-typing a 2,000-page autobiography on a classic Mac, bound twelve hardcover copies and mailed them to relatives. The family reaction was bad. My sister liked it. Much later I wrote My Life in Crazytown.

One sympathetic reader out of a dozen is a thin return on a year of typing, and it’s still one more than most first manuscripts get.

What kind of encouragement helps a young writer?

Encouragement works when it’s specific. Every story above has an adult doing one concrete thing, and none of them amounts to saying “great job.”

Byron handed an eighteen-year-old a contest with other writers waiting to hear the result, while Patrick Brontë handed his children twelve soldiers and then left them alone with the game for years. Hinton’s publisher thought hard enough about her book to plan around reviewers. Paolini’s parents held off spending money until two more years of revision were done, and Bolkestein told an occupied country its ordinary records would be wanted. Each of them treated the young writer as somebody producing work that would be read. The expectation did more than any compliment could.

Vague praise does damage. A kid who hears that everything is wonderful learns that the adults aren’t reading closely, and stops trusting the response. A kid told the line about the dog was funny, and the middle got confusing when the brothers traded places, knows somebody read every word. The second answer contains criticism, and it’s far more encouraging than the first.

An adult who corrects the spelling first can end a young writer fast. Daisy Ashford wrote The Young Visiters at nine, in 1890, in an exercise book, and when it was published in 1919 with a preface by J.M. Barrie, the mistakes stayed in. An adult who corrected them in 1890 would have been teaching the wrong lesson.

How should you mark Encourage a Young Writer Day?

Read something a young person wrote, all the way through, and tell them two specific things: one line that worked and one place you got lost.

If you’re a parent or grandparent, offer yourself as an interview subject. Hand over a recorder and the questions you’d want asked. The young writer gets real material and the family gets a record it can’t make later.

If you teach, set a real deadline and a real audience. Byron’s contest worked because a room of writers was waiting to hear the stories, and a class reading, a school paper or a letter mailed to a relative can do the same job on a smaller scale. Then make sure the kid has a library card. I Love to Write Day has more on building the habit, and the full calendar of observances is on the literary holidays list.

And if you’re the adult who always meant to write a book, the young writer in your house isn’t the only one who could use some encouragement. I work with first-time authors through book coaching, and the method doesn’t change between sixteen and sixty: specific notes, real deadlines and somebody who reads every page.

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