Learning About Word Choice at Age Six or Seven

I titled my book, "The Magic Christmas Violin." I don't know what inspired it. I just remember that, one afternoon, alone in my bedroom, sitting at my blue and green cardboard table in my blue and green cardboard chair, I decided to make my own picture book.

It was probably December, or late November, of 1972 or 1973, when the TV commercials were beginning to mention Christmas, as were my school teachers. This explains my book's Christmas theme.

The "magic" part must have been inspired by the animated Christmas TV specials I watched which always involved some kind of magic, be it corn that makes reindeer fly or Santa Claus' crystal ball he uses to see what children are doing all over the world. That idea used to make me feel very self-conscious sometimes, but that's another story.

But why the violin? I have no idea. Maybe it was because it was an instrument I could actually draw. I had never played any instrument but a toy piano, a toy drum, a tambourine, those painted sticks with the grooves that you rub together and a triangle. Also, I played the guitar you make by wrapping rubber bands around an open shoe box.

Drawing a violin with a crayon is basically drawing a number eight, coloring it in brown, drawing some black vertical lines through it for the strings, and adding a long gray line for a bow.

What was the magic of this violin? It played itself. I probably got that idea from TV, too. I watched a lot of reruns of Bewitched and I Dream of Jeanie after school on Milwaukee's one independent TV station, Channel 18.

I don't remember a lot about creating this book. I remember I used different colors of construction paper to make the pages, and crayons to draw the pictures. I probably used one of those fat pencils for small children to print out the words. I remember those were navy blue. My mother must have stapled the pages together.

The book has been lost, as my family moved several times during my childhood, but, judging from other bits of my writing that survived longer, I'm sure there was not much respect for rules of capitalization, nor basic letter shapes, especially with the capital "E". I tended to make an "E" with many more than three horizontal lines, so that it resembled a hair comb more than a letter.

What I remember the most about the first book I wrote was reading it with my dad that evening after he came home from work. We both sat on the couch. I can't remember who read the book aloud. Maybe we took turns.

I had only gotten halfway through reading the first page, which said that the little girl who the story was about (I forget her name), left her house one snowy morning and "set off for school."

"Set off for school!" my dad interrupted, "That's an interesting choice of words! Like a grownup writer!"

I didn't expect this reaction. I had read and heard him and others read so many stories to me, it just seemed an appropriate phrase.

My dad continued, "I mean, other kids your age might just say, 'she walked to school', or 'she went to school'. But you wrote, 'set off for school'.

Looking back at this moment fifty years later, I think my dad was trying to tell me that my phrase was unusually literary for my age.

Though I didn't exactly know what he meant at the time, I did learn something important halfway through page one of my first storybook: the words a writer uses make a difference.

Words are not just tools to tell a story. They can change the meaning of a sentence, or set a different tone, or set a literary style for a written piece. They are crayons of many different colors and shades. Which ones you choose to tell your story can change the entire picture.