Kids’ writing software is like a regular old notepad after a few energy drinks. I wish I’d had something as fun to use for writing when I was a kid. However, I’m glad they’ve come out with such neat ideas for my own kids to use and one piece of software, in particular, has made a world of difference.

My middle son is very bright and, yes, I’m partially biased because I’m his mother but I have some proof from the school to back that up. He does not, however, like to write in any way, shape, or form including making notes about his homework assignments, finishing his homework assignments, or even writing notes to friends. To say this has caused us some grief with schoolwork would be an understatement.

Over the course of the past summer, I was determined to turn things around before school started up again. Not only would it make things so much easier on me, but I really wanted him to feel more confident and less intimidated by writing assignments. While I tackled this undertaking in a number of ways, it was a piece of kids’ writing software that really opened his eyes.

The Story Wizard, a kids’ writing software program that helps children write stories, completely entertained him. This software has some very special features that guide a child through the entire story writing process. It has a seemingly endless supply of name suggestions for characters, a built in spell-checker, a thesaurus, tools for creating a storyline, and a great book cover design application.

My son didn’t immediately seem interested, though. It took a bit of convincing. He truly hadn’t any notion to want to write a story. The fact that I wanted him to try to write one was a bit appealing because I was going to let him use the computer more than his allotted time, but he wasn’t fooled – it was still writing. It wasn’t until I told him that I, myself, wanted to write a book and that I wanted it to be about him, that he began to get very interested. Suddenly, he was giving me ideas for the book, asking for bits of paper at the grocery store so he could make some notes, and starting his own story well before I had a chance to even make an outline for my own.

I’ve been pleasantly surprised to see him not only write more but to write for fun, for the shear pleasure of putting words together and creating his own fictional universe. I have high hopes that this school year is going to be very different from the last few and just in the nick of time, too. He’s only two years away from high school and, as any concerned parent, I’m doing all I can to get him as best prepared as he can possibly be. The help of this neat kids’ writing software may have just done the trick.