Parents sometimes ask what they should buy to make their child “more creative” — which app, which kit, which class. It is a lovely question with an annoying answer: creativity is not really a thing you buy. It is more like a recipe, and it only has two ingredients.
Ingredient one: noticing the little things. The way rain runs down a bus window and races itself. The smell of the kitchen when someone is frying onions. A cat asleep in a patch of sun, shaped exactly like a croissant. Children are naturally brilliant at this — it is adults who walk past it all. You do not need to teach noticing. You just need to stop and look when they point, instead of hurrying them along. The little things, it turns out, are actually the big things.
Ingredient two: finding the magic in being exactly who they are. The foods their family eats, the languages spoken across their dinner table, the festivals they celebrate, the city outside their window. A child who believes their own life is interesting has an endless supply of material. A child who believes stories only happen to other kinds of people, in other kinds of houses, will always be borrowing someone else’s.
Mix the two together and something quietly wonderful happens. A drawing stops being “a house” and becomes their house, with grandma’s slippers by the door. A story stops being about a generic princess and becomes about a girl on the 73 bus who can talk to pigeons. The page fills up with things nobody else could have made — because nobody else is them.
That belief is the whole reason our notebooks look the way they do. Tamarind and rose sharbat sit next to London cabs and rainbows, because that is what the world actually looks like to a child growing up in a city like ours — and every bit of it deserves to feel like the start of a story.
No app required. Just a pencil, a blank page, and the radical idea that their ordinary day is worth writing down.