[00:00:00] Matthew Young: Storytelling has predated the written language thousands of years. The oral traditions of passing on stories and through stories that we tell around the campfire, this predates the written language. We developed writing as a tool. Writing is a tool. Writing is a tool to communicate, just like painting is, dance, art forms. We developed that so that we could tell stories.

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[00:00:36] Gretchen Roe: Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to The Demme Learning Show. This is Gretchen Roe. I am so excited to have this conversation today with Matthew Young, the creator of Read Write Create. I have to tell you, I’m a grandma. I have a granddaughter who’s nine and is very, very creative. Matthew and I met last summer at an Atlanta homeschool conference, and I fell in love with the way he presented materials.

My granddaughter loved his materials so much, she has now gone on to sit down with her dad and learn how to make her own book after getting a writing book from Matthew to figure out how to be creative. Now she’s in the process of binding her second storybook, which I think is pretty wild. You’ll find out more as Matthew and I talk together today. I’m really, really excited for us to have this conversation. Shall I allow you to introduce yourself, kind sir? [laughs]

[00:01:37] Matthew: Well, thank you, Gretchen. I appreciate that. I’ll make one correction. I’m the co-creator with my twin brother. I’m a twin.

[00:01:43] Gretchen: This is true. I’m sorry. I should have included Jared in that.

[00:01:48] Matthew: That’s all right. I don’t want to take all the credit. We’re a duo. We do everything together. He is the lead designer, designs everything that we do. Then I come up with crazy ideas, and he brings them to life. The set behind me, he designed. Designed a lot of what you see here. This is the Read Write Create clubhouse, we call it, that I’m standing in. I do a lot of my live lessons from here and stuff like that.

Yes, just a brief introduction. We’re actually filmmakers by trade. We’ve been filmmakers for over 20 years now. We’ve always had a toe in the education space. We actually used to work for churches. We worked in the faith-based world. We started doing live shows at churches. Then, this one church just hired us to make curriculum for them randomly. We’re like, “Okay, we’ll try that.” We learned everything we could. We started making small group curriculum for children’s ministries.

Then that’s how we eventually came to work with a guy named Phil Vischer, who created Veggie Tales. He hired us. We made a bunch of content for him when we were in the early part of our 20s, early, mid-20s. We made a bunch of content for a streaming service he had at the time called Jelly Telly Media. This was what he started right on the heels of Veggie Tales going bankrupt. I don’t know if people know this, but Veggie Tales went bankrupt in the early 2000s. He started this new company.

We worked for him for a few years, perfecting our craft as filmmakers and storytellers. Then we went on to just make documentaries and other feature films. We’ve done a lot of commercial work for companies in our area. We’re outside of Atlanta, Georgia. That’s our background. We’ve always been creatives, always been storytellers. Then, when COVID hit, we had met a man by the name of Stan Tucker, who was a teacher. He just had a heart for literacy. He wanted to design a program called Share Your Story, which would teach kids how to write books.

We teamed up with him to make a simple children’s show. It’s still around. It’s called The Very Airy Library. You can look it up, veryairylibrary.com. This brought us back into that children’s production world, but it also brought us into the education world, specifically the literacy education world. I won’t get ahead of myself because I’m sure you have leading questions that you want to ask. That got us to where we’re at today. I can go into a little bit more depth into that in a minute. That’s just a broad overview of who we are.

[00:04:29] Gretchen: Now, what you guys are doing is still full-time on the creative tip of the spear as far as creating, but you’re creating for audiences who are learning the process of telling their story. Tell me a little bit more about that. How did you make the switch from being content creation to really what you’re doing is your content collaborating, but you’re pulling content out of kids?

[00:04:54] Matthew: Yes, I think that’s correct. I think we’ve always had a heart for the instruction side of it. I’ve always loved teaching, loved sharing how we make stuff. It’s always been a passion. It’s always been on our hearts. I think, going through the process with Stan, when we made the first curriculum for him, we just helped him go through the design and did all the work. It birthed in us that desire to do more with it, to teach the art of storytelling, to teach the art of creativity.

I say it’s how do we develop and get ideas in our heads, and then how do we get those out of our heads and into the world? We developed this business, this company, which is Read Write Create, around those ideas. I say we make tools to tell stories. Now, over the past few years, we’ve developed not only products that we sell in stores, like toy stores and book stores and gift shops. We have these cool kiosks, and we sell all kinds of stuff that just inspire kids to make things like your granddaughter has.

Then, simultaneously, I started developing my own creative writing curriculum that I teach. I teach creative writing workshops to kids ages 8 to 14. I also teach teenagers. I use some different stuff for that. My 8 to 14-year-olds, I teach creative writing. I call it my creative writing trilogy. I teach those right here. You can physically come to our studio and take workshops in this crazy classroom, or I do it online as well.

I have kids all over the country that I teach as well. Yes, we just fell in love. We love telling stories. We love the creative process and whatever medium form that takes. That’s where Read Write Create came from. That’s how I’m here right now with you. [chuckles]

[00:06:45] Gretchen: I think it’s terrific because we need to inspire the next generation of storytellers. There is something so rich about being able to fully enter into a story. I don’t want to throw anybody under the bus, but I think with the advent of these things, these digital devices, kids don’t have the same connectedness to stories that they did. They don’t have to be creative because they can be passive consumers of this content. Our world exists in its rich depth and breadth because we had that creativity. I would like to see that fostered into the next generation.

[00:07:32] Matthew: Oh, yes. I think you hit the nail on the head. We think that creativity is more important than it’s ever been. The ability to learn how to create in general because creativity is medium-agnostic. What I mean by that is it doesn’t matter what field you go in. The ability to generate ideas from nothing, to formulate them, and then to take those ideas and to be able to communicate them into the world in whatever medium you choose, that’s a skill that can be developed. It can be honed.

I was giving a talk the other day on writing. I think the title of my talk was Develop a Love for Writing Before the Red Pen Comes Out. [chuckles] Somewhere along the lines, we put the cart before the horse. What I mean by that is we decided that writing comes first, and then creativity and storytelling follow. One of the things I pointed out is that storytelling has predated the written language thousands of years. The oral traditions of passing on stories and through stories that we tell around the campfire, this predates the written language.

We developed writing as a tool. Writing is a tool. Writing is a tool to communicate, just like painting is, dance, art forms. We developed that so that we could tell stories.

A lot of times, what we see happening, especially with young kids, is that through testing, through rigorous testing, whatever it is, standards, whatever it is, we say, “Well, that grammar is not right. The spelling’s all wrong. You’re not going to be able to tell stories if you don’t get this right.” That’s simply not true. That’s why when I teach, I tell parents, “I don’t teach grammar, I don’t teach mechanics, I don’t teach spelling. You don’t want me teaching your child those things because I’m terrible at those things.”

What I do is I teach kids how to create, how to come up with ideas, how to formulate those ideas, and how to put those ideas on the paper. My goal, when I teach, and my goal to communicate to other instructors, is that creativity, first and foremost, is about creating a safe space for the student, the child. What I mean by safe, I don’t mean literally put shields up. I mean a safe space where they can be weird and crazy and come up with ideas and not feel judged that their spelling’s not right, that their grammar’s not right, that their idea doesn’t meet some sort of preconceived standard that we have.

If we can create a safe space for a child to just be weird, be crazy, come up with stuff, they’re going to develop a love for storytelling, a love for creativity, and the writing will follow. There will be a desire to want to communicate what they’re creating, and so that’s where the tool of writing comes in. I went on a bit of a tangent there. I don’t know.

[00:10:42] Gretchen: No, you didn’t because you’re singing the song of my soul. As a creative writing instructor for almost 20 years and someone who has taught from stage, we say to kids, “Here’s an eight-year-old who wants to tell a story about an elephant.”

“An elephant– I don’t know how to spell elephant, so I’ll tell you a story about a pig because I can spell pig.”

We miss the opportunity to hear a fantastic story about an elephant because they’re hung up on not knowing how to spell the word.

[00:11:14] Matthew: Exactly.

[00:11:14] Gretchen: That’s not what we want for our children. We want them to be creative. I love the fact that you are creating what you call a safe space. It’s a space where there’s no rules, really, as far as you can be as creative as you want to be. That’s really exciting.

[00:11:33] Matthew: That’s right. That’s the goal. That’s what I try to do.

[00:11:39] Gretchen: Tell me how you all do that. Tell me what happens in a class when you teach a class. In my mind, I have this vision of here’s a whole bunch of kids who have learned to write what we referred to in my family as dragnet style. It’s just the facts. There’s a noun, there’s a verb, there’s a period, that’s it, and no creativity whatsoever. You’re sitting there like this waiting for you to uncork them. How do you pull that cork from the bottle?

[00:12:09] Matthew: Again, the first thing I do is try to create that. Typically, I won’t have more than eight or so kids in my group. They can range. They’re mixed ability groups. It could be eight-year-olds. Typically, no younger than eight. I will occasionally get an advanced seven-year-old that is a little bit more forward-thinking. Most of the time, 8 to 13, 14-year-olds. They can all be in one group, so mixed ability group.

The first thing that I do say to them is, “You can write everything we do here. You can draw everything you do here. It can be a combination. I am not going to stand over your shoulder. I’m not checking your spelling, your grammar. My number one goal is that when you get done with this,” and I have activity books that we work through, “that when you get finished with this, you have an understanding, a memory, a knowledge of what you’ve created. That’s what’s important to me.

No one else is going to be looking at this, but you do have to be able to pick this up a week, two weeks, three weeks, a year from now, and be able to look at this and have an understanding of what you do. That’s what I say first. The next thing we do is we just start the brainstorm process. I have some tools that we created that I use. One of them I call story stones. They’re just writing prompts on these little tokens. All they do is have pictures and words on them. They give kids a place to start.

I just dump them out on a table. I pour them out on a table, and kids get an opportunity to use those if they need just an idea. The thing we hear the most– I got a set right here. They’re just little tokens. I can see. I just dump them out on a table. I’ve got a few different versions, a few different genres. I do this with my older kids, too. The thing we hear the most is, “Where do I start?” I think you mentioned that. “I don’t know where to start.”

Ideas can come from anywhere. You could look around the room behind me and probably have an idea for a thousand stories. What are your hobbies? What do you enjoy doing? Where do you live? What does a typical day for you look like? What’s your favorite sport? What’s your favorite food? Just get them talking about things in their life, or we use story stones to say, take a look around this room and see if there’s anything that sparks an idea. There’s no bad ideas.

Through my process, I start with brainstorming. The first thing I do is have them brainstorm three different types of characters. I’ll show you. This is my character creator workbook that I design, that I work out of. One of the first activities we do is we just brainstorm three different types of characters. They do not have to be fully developed. Is it a sci-fi fantasy character? Are you making an alien or are you making a monster? Is it a unicorn, something from another world? You can write unicorn or write alien here, or more often than not, they just start drawing little pictures. I love to just let kids draw, just let them go.

Brainstorm a sci-fi or fantasy character. The next thing I say is brainstorm a real-world character. Is it a child just like you? Is it an athlete? Is it a musician? Is it a dog, like your pet dog or pet cat? Then the last thing I do is my wildcard brainstorm, is brainstorm just an inanimate object? Take an inanimate object, and I throw a big word at them. I say, “We’re going to anthropomorphize something. We’re going to give an inanimate object human characteristics. Just pick something out of your backpack. Look at your tennis shoes.”

Here’s an example of one of our stapler. This is Chomp Chomp right here. He’s just a stapler. I took a stapler and made just a little character. That’s a good way to start, too. There’s inanimate objects wherever. The chair you’re sitting in can be a character. Ideas can come from anywhere. Getting those brainstorms. Then at the end of that process, we take about 5 to 10 minutes there. Then I just say circle the one that speaks to you the most. Circle the one that you want to work on throughout this workshop.

They can adjust and change as they go. I encourage that. This gives them at least a simple place to start. We haven’t added any characteristics yet. We haven’t done any of the details. We’ve just done a very broad, “I’m going to make a pencil character. I’m going to make an alien. I’m going to make a student or a child.” Then we go from there. Safe space, help them brainstorm.

[00:16:46] Gretchen: One of the things I think that’s terrific about what you’re referring to as a safe space is most of the time in a classroom, there is a predetermined agenda. We’re going to write about some. I vividly remember one of my kids, he’s now in his 30s, but he was given an assignment in a writing curriculum that we had to write about baseball. I have to be honest with you, the sports section hits the trash can unopened at my house. None of us knew anything about baseball. We had no interest in baseball.

Here he was, required to tell a creative story about baseball. There was no creativity there because he had nothing. That was such a frustrating experience. I learned, in that moment, that if you can do what you’re doing, where you’re asking them to create the world, then it’s so much easier for them to enter into whatever world it is that they create.

[00:17:52] Matthew: I always start with characters first. I think that that takes some of the intimidation out of the process for the child. A lot of times, what you see in a classroom or the way that somebody who is not very familiar with storytelling, they’ll go, “We’re going to tell a story today. What’s our story going to be about?” Story comes out of an interesting character inhabiting an interesting setting with a goal, something they want to achieve.

There’s obstacles and problems that get in the way of that goal. That is a story. The first thing we got to do is we start with a character. This takes some of the intimidation out of it for a child. Like I just showed you, before we tell a story, before we build a world, we’re going to figure out our character. We’re going to give them a personality. What are they good at? What do they struggle with? We’re going to figure out what they look like.

Is it an alien? Is it a child? What’s their style? What do they wear? What are some of their physical attributes? How do they talk? How do they move? Then we’re going to give them a goal, something they want to achieve, and the problems and obstacles that are preventing them from achieving those goals. We’ll find out that our personality traits create obstacles for us. Some of us are obstinate. Some of us are reckless. Some of us are hardheaded. Some of us are clever, a little dishonest.

These personality traits dictate some of the choices that we make. The first thing I do is I start with a character. Once I have a character, then we go to world. The next thing in, I call it my creative writing trilogy, it goes character, then world builder. Once I know who my character is, I can start to shape the world that they’re from. Are they an alien from another planet? What’s the geography of that planet? What’s the climate of that planet? What’s the culture of that planet? Who else inhabits that planet?

Then I have them map the planet, so we get an understanding of where the dangerous things are and where the safe things are, where my character’s home is. Now, inside their head, they have their character, they have their world, they know their character’s goal. Then the stories just flow out of that. In the third step, I teach them basic story structure, a three-act structure that teaches them how to introduce their character and their world, which they already have, they already created, their character’s goal. What does their character want? An inciting incident, which kicks off the action of our story, rising tension, obstacles that increase in difficulty as we go, leading to the climax, to the resolution.

When you start with character and world, the storytelling part comes naturally. I tell people, think about this, you cannot have a story without a character or a setting. You can’t have a character on its own, you can’t have a world on its own. You cannot have a story. The technique of starting with story, Pixar has this old phrase, “Story is king.” What they mean is just the script is king. Story only falls out of great characters and great worlds, and characters that want to achieve something, and the problems, challenges, and obstacles that prevent them from doing that.

[00:21:22] Gretchen: You know what else you have done here is you have created a very stable structure. You’ve got a structure that’s a triangle here, you’ve got character, you’ve got world, and then you’ve got whatever occurs in that world. Having that stable structure, it gives kids the idea to understand that you can’t have one without the other two. That’s huge.

[00:21:52] Matthew: Yes, that’s my basic technique for storytelling. I think that process takes a lot of the intimidation out of it for the child and the instructor because I do have a very structured process for which I go through. I think that formula and that structure makes the creative process a little bit easier on the students going through it.

[00:22:15] Gretchen: What happens with. In a typical class for you, how long are these kids there?

[00:22:23] Matthew: My workshops, like I said, it’s a trilogy. I do an hour and a half straight with my kids. I don’t recommend that. If you have the opportunity to do, I would probably more recommend breaking it up into 30-minute sessions across one of the books. I like to give the kids lots of time to work, too. I will pause, I play music, I’ll scroll up the music while they’re working, give them 10 minutes to work on an aspect, whichever step that we’re on.

We go hard for an hour and a half straight, no breaks. We go all the way to the end. I’ve never had an issue of kids not wanting to finish. Obviously, you’ve got to have stamina with some of your younger kids, and you might start to see it wear off towards the end. They’re with me for the hour and a half. Across the three books, you’re talking about three sessions at an hour and a half a piece.

When I do my Zoom sessions, I do it an hour and a half with the kids. We go and get through that character creation. Then once we have our character, we’ll do our world builder in the next session, and we’ll do the story writer in the next session. I wish I could have more sessions with kids, but time and cost prohibitive for everybody. These are things that they can work on their own as well.

You will start to see that when a child gets excited about what they’re making, their mind starts to run. Inevitably, when we’re building that character, they’re already thinking about who else is in that world. Their story has just started going off in their head. I always have to be like, “Slow down. We’re going to take some time here.” If I were to put one of my activity books in front of a child and walk away, they’d be done in 5 or 10 minutes. [laughs] They’d be like, “Oh, I’m done.” It’s like, “No. We’re going to take time. We’re going to think about this. We’re going to process. We’re just going to work with our hands for a little bit. We’re going to really develop these things.” Those are where those ideas really start to come out when they start developing those things.

[00:24:33] Gretchen: One of the things that you’re giving them the latitude to do, which we often don’t have the opportunity to do when we’re teaching creative writing, is, particularly if you’re a parent who has a little bit of hesitancy about teaching it, you want to follow the curriculum. As someone who teaches creative writing myself, I understand, particularly if you’re the parent who writes in that dragnet way, who wants just the facts, it’s very hard to step away from a curriculum that prescribes for you what you want to do.

If we want creativity and we want our children to remain engaged with the process, then we absolutely positively need to maintain that creativity by pressing into their creativity. That may be something that you haven’t thought about before. Maybe it’s giving them clay and having the opportunity to create their character. Once they can see what their character looks like, then they have the opportunity to tell that story about the character.

The most important thing I would encourage a parent to do when you’re teaching creative writing is to not evaluate your student’s work too early. Sometimes, as parents, we have an agenda. I’ve got a script. I’ve got this much work I’ve got to get through, and I need to get through it with some degree of expediency. That expediency is the enemy of creativity. If we can wait, if we can just pause. As a matter of fact, one of the things I encourage parents to do often is your child doesn’t need to have a pencil in their hand to be creative.

When an executive writes a letter and has his administrative assistant type that letter up, who wrote that letter? Is it the executive or the administrative assistant? The truth really is it’s the executive’s thoughts executed on paper by the administrative assistant. There’s nothing that says that you can’t be your student’s administrative assistant to write out information successfully for your kids. Sit down with your child. Let them create that clay object. Let them tell you the story about that object. Ask questions that are creative, that keep your child in the creative end of the experience.

“Oh, that’s so interesting. Your alien landed on this planet, and there’s no oxygen there. How does your alien breathe? Oh, through their feet. Oh, that’s really interesting. If they breathe through their feet, do they have eyes? Can they see? How do they perceive their environment? What happens when they walk through the planet they’ve landed on?” It’s always an interesting enterprise to allow your child to remain creative as they talk about this.

You can see why I really wanted Matthew to be here to have this conversation. Matthew, what do you want our guests to take away from our conversation today? What do you want parents to recognize in the writing process?

[00:28:10] Matthew: I’ll speak about creativity in general. I think we’re at a crossroads. Definitely with AI, Artificial Intelligence. We say, “Oh, you can just put in a prompt, and something comes out on the other side.” AI is just a tool like anything else. I use AI. I use it to fix my grammar. I use it so that I communicate my ideas better. I think human creativity—my brother and I talk about this—is more important than ever. There’s a freedom in these tools that we have now, where it’s unleashing creativity.

We’ve been hindered by some of our ancillary abilities, whether that’s to actually visualize, to draw. If you make movies, your ability to have the finances and the resource to produce a movie of any sort of scale, a programmer, whatever it is. I think human creativity is as, if not more important than it’s ever been. The ability, the future success of a child, if they can learn how to take ideas, develop ideas, and to take ideas and to communicate those into the world, then I think they can be successful beyond whatever AI is at.

AI is only going to do what we input it to do. If we hit the point where AI is just doing its own thing, which I’m not saying we won’t hit that for some aspect, I don’t think AI is going to have anything to do with us at that point. It’s just going to disappear into the ether. [chuckles] If we use it in the capacity that it exists right now, the ability to create, to ideate, to imagine, to invent, to come up with cures, to new toys, new ways of transportation, new whatever, that’s all creativity, right? That’s all comes from the imagination, the human ability to imagine, and then take those tools and to output them into the world.

If you take anything away today, I would say that the ability to encourage and to make safe space for our kids to create is as important as it has ever been.

[00:30:21] Gretchen: Absolutely. I think AI is a tool. I had a guest last summer who said something that has stayed with me ever since then. She said, if you’re using AI to step around the academic process, then you’re sort of shortchanging yourself. The flip side of that coin is if you can’t think more creatively than AI can, why would someone employ you? Why would someone hire you? Why would someone seek you out?

I think that’s the balance that we as parents need to strike. It’s a tool just like any other tool, just like my pen is a tool or my chopsticks that are laying here on my desk. They’re tools, but we’ve got to figure out how to use them and be successful with them. Before we finish, tell us your website so folks can go find out more about you and the classes that you teach.

[00:31:17] Matthew: Yes, it’s readwritecreate.org, .com is too expensive. You can find out about the workshops that I teach in there. You can sign up for a live, a Zoom. We are based in Marietta, Georgia, right outside of Atlanta. We do field trips at our studio. We do these really cool film studio experiences where kids get on their feet, and they use cameras, and we teach them how we make our shows. That’s a really fun, interactive experience. If you’re in the area and you want to have your child do a live workshop here with me, it’s a lot of fun. I do it right here in our studio. It’s just a creative vibe.

I would say, just check out our website and see what we offer. Then we do have just our creative products that we sell. They make great gifts for those creative kids in your life if you’re looking for an interesting birthday present that promotes creativity and imagination. I think they’re fun, really cool, cute things to just give children, especially if you’re already–

[00:32:19] Gretchen: Well, I can speak from a grandparent’s perspective. They’re amazing.

[00:32:22] Matthew: Thank you.

[00:32:23] Gretchen: I wasn’t sure how it would be received. I was so impressed with how it was received. Sometimes you give a present, and in the moment, they’re very excited, but then it hits a shelf, and it’s never seen again.

[00:32:37] Matthew: Yes, absolutely.

[00:32:38] Gretchen: Knowing that she found your material so compelling that she walked all the way through them, that says something special about your products.

[00:32:48] Matthew: Thank you. I appreciate it. That’s the hope, and that’s the goal.

[00:32:51] Gretchen: Absolutely. Well, I want to thank you so much for joining me today. I want to thank our audience for being here, for allowing us to come into your living room. We’ll look forward to joining you again sometime in the future. Take care, everybody. Have a wonderful afternoon. Bye-bye.

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