writing

‘My name is Ernest Miller Hemingway I was born on July 21, 1899. My favourite authors are Kipling, O. Henry and Stewart Edward White. My favourite flower is the Lady Slipper and Tiger Lily. My favourite sports are Trout fishing, Hiking, shooting, football and boxing. My favourite studies are English, Zoology and Chemistry. I intend to travel and write.’

When digging into some of our research whilst the app development was going and code was flying all around us, I found in the midst of it all, Ernest Hemingway’s first ever diary entry. I was thrilled. I love the simplicity of the entry. He was nine at the time and yet even then he wrote in the style with which he was to become famous for.

When DiaryZapp was in the testing phase, both Noah and Ella were avidly writing and drawing their days before zapping them off to their buddies, and also my mother who is already loving the extra contact. Most of their entries focus at the moment on the everyday – the canoeing, the trips to their friend’s houses and drawings of birthday cakes or wild beasts. But I know at some point they’ll list a whole host of plans, dreams and adventures that they’d like to go on. And I’ll encourage them to do so.

DiaryZapp has a whole host of ideas for your child to write about, so never worry that they’ll be stuck on what to create – things like ‘what did you discover today?’ or ‘what made you smile the most today?’

Seeing Hemingway’s notebook made me realise how much I’m looking forward to seeing what they pursue in life and finding out whether or not they like it. Talk of goals, ambitions and dreams in terms of diary entries are often only asked in late December or January when people are preparing their list of resolutions. I agree wholeheartedly with Will Smith on this, he said to his children: ‘if something is important enough to create a resolution about, why wait until January.’

Exactly. Why wait at all?

One aspect that we wanted DiaryZapp to harness, was to enable children to be openly creative at any given time…

Why wait for January? Why wait until a teacher tells you to create a diary for homework? Gosh in our current state of testing, our friend’s lovely daughter became a Test Zapper and is getting up early to zapp before she goes to school. She started it on a random day of the week and she’s never looked back.

We found out this week that it wasn’t until 1752 that the ‘new year’ technically changed to starting in January. Prior to that it ran from the 25th March… So there’s really no excuse to wait for technical days to start writing about adventures of the everyday. You never know where it could lead… And if you’re feeling inspired to get creative yourself, don’t forget that one purchase of DiaryZapp can have up to five writers – on that note I’d better go and start mine now…