My Daughter, the Playwright!

So, my ten year old daughter 'surprised' us on Christmas Day by presenting her brother, her mother and I each with a 10 page part of a play she's been writing. (I say 'surprised' because we all knew she had been hiding away to write something as a present, but we didn't know exactly what.)

Part One: The School Problem, she gave to her brother.

Part Two: The Report was for me.

Part Three: Moving Day she gave to her mom.

The play is about the adventures of a girl named Jane and her little brother J.J. as they navigate a school bully, J.J.'s major oral report on an animal, and her neighbor friend's impending move to San Diego. All three parts seem to involve the family's watching one of the Star Wars movies every Friday night (which we had been doing when she was writing - she instinctively knew to 'write what you know'!).

I took her hand written pages and typed them into Final Draft today, and used the Voice feature so it would read it out loud to her (as robotic as the people sounded). She got a big kick out of that, and we did a tiny bit of rewriting to fix some of the misspellings and typos.

At the end of part three, the story is far from over, so I'm really hoping she keeps writing. I'm very proud of what she's been able to do so far.