Walking on Water (11 page)

“A children's book is any book a child will read.”

First my children and now my grandchildren are proof of this, moving from children's books marketed for their own age range—the girls are ten and eleven years old—to any grown-up novel I think would appeal to them. All they require is a protagonist with whom they can identify (and they prefer the protagonist to be older than they are), an adventure to make them turn the pages, and the making of a decision on the part of the protagonist. We name ourselves by the choices we make, and we can help in our own naming by living through the choices, right and wrong, of the heroes and heroines whose stories we read.

To name is to love. To be Named is to be loved. So in a very true sense the great works which help us to be more named also love us and help us to love.

One summer I taught a class in techniques of fiction at a midwestern university. About halfway through the course, one of the students came up to me after class and said, “I do hope you're going to teach us something about writing for children. That's really why I'm taking this course.”

“What have I been teaching you?”

“Well—writing.”

“Don't you write when you write for children?”

“Well—but isn't it different?”

No, it is not different. The techniques of fiction are the techniques of fiction. They hold as true for Beatrix Potter as they do for Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Characterization, style, theme, are as important in a children's book as in a novel for grownups. Taste, as always, will differ (spinach vs. beets again). A child is not likely to identify with the characters in Faulkner's
Sanctuary.
Books like
A Wrinkle in Time
may seem too difficult to some parents. But if a book is not good enough for a grownup, it is not good enough for a child.

So what, then, are the differences?

Most of them are minor, and apparent. A child wants to read about another child, a child living in and having adventures in a world which can be recognized and accepted. As long as what the protagonist does is true, this world can be unlimited, for a child can identify with a hero in ancient Britain, darkest Africa, or the year two thousand and ninety-three.

When I was a child I browsed through my parents' books when I had finished my own. What was not part of my own circumference of comprehension I simply skipped; sex scenes when I was eight or nine had little relevance for me, so I skipped over them. They didn't hurt me because they had no meaning for me. In a book which is going to be marketed for children it is usually better to write within the child's frame of reference, but there is no subject which should, in itself, be taboo. If it is essential for the development of the child protagonist, there is nothing which may not be included. It is
how
it is included which makes its presence permissible or impermissible. Some books about—for instance—child abuse are important and deeply moving; others may be little more than a form of infant porno.

Children don't like antiheroes. Neither do I. I don't think many people do, despite the proliferation of novels in the past few decades with antiheroes for protagonists. I think we all want to be able to identify with the major character in a book—to live, suffer, dream, and grow through vicarious experience. I need to be able to admire the protagonist despite his faults and so be given a glimpse of my own potential. There have been a few young-adult novels written recently with antiheroes; from all reports they are not the books which are read and reread. We don't want to feel
less
when we have finished a book; we want to feel that new possibilities of being have been opened to us. We don't want to close a book with a sense that life is totally unfair and that there is no light in the darkness; we want to feel that we have been given illumination.

One summer at a writer's conference I felt that something was wrong with most of the juvenile manuscripts I received—not all of them, but enough so that it worried me, especially because I couldn't put my finger on what was wrong.

On the last day of the conference all the workshops were open, and almost everybody attended them all. Most of the students had been in two or three workshops, so I had the opportunity to listen to poems, stories, sections of novels, written by the men and women from my workshop. In almost every case, the work in the other workshops was better than the work they had turned in to me, and I discovered to my horror that they had been writing down, not so much down to children as down to themselves, writing below their own capacity. I listened to an excellent story written by a young man who had turned in some indifferent material to me, and after class I figuratively shook him as I said, “
That
is the way you write for children: the way you wrote that story,
not
the—junk you wrote for me.”

A child is not afraid of new ideas, does not have to worry about the status quo or rocking the boat, is willing to sail into uncharted waters. Those tired old editors who had a hard time understanding
A Wrinkle in Time
assumed that children couldn't understand it either. Even when Farrar, Straus and Giroux, to which house I am devoted, decided to risk taking it, they warned me that they did not expect it to sell well, and they did not think it could possibly be read by anyone under high school age. This is the typical underestimation of the adult as to the capacity of children to understand philosophical, scientific, and theological concepts. But there is no idea that is too difficult for children as long as it underlies a good story and quality writing.

As to
Wrinkle,
it reflects my discovery that higher math is easier than lower math, that higher math deals with ideas, asks questions which may not have single answers. My reading of Einstein, Planck, Dessauer, Eddington, Jeans, Heisenberg, etc., was for me an adventure in theology. I had been reading too many theologians, particularly German theologians. I was at a point in my life where my faith in God and the loving purposes of Creation was very insecure, and I wanted desperately to have my faith strengthened. If I could not believe in a God who truly cared about every atom and subatom of his creation, then life seemed hardly worth living. I asked questions, cosmic questions, and the German theologians answered them all—and they were questions which should not have been answered in such a finite, laboratory-proof manner. I read their rigid answers, and I thought sadly,
If I have to believe all this limiting of God, then I cannot be a Christian.
And I wanted to be one.

I had yet to learn the
faithfulness
of doubt. This is often assumed by the judgmental to be faith
less
ness, but it is not; it is a prerequisite for a living faith.

Francis Bacon writes in
De Augmentis,
“If we begin with certainties, we will end in doubt. But if we begin with doubts and bear them patiently, we may end in certainty.”

The anonymous author of
The Cloud of Unknowing
writes, “By love God may be gotten and holden, but by thought or understanding, never.”

Love, not answers.

Love, which trusts God so implicitly despite the cloud (and is not the cloud a sign of God?), that it is brave enough to ask questions, no matter how fearful.

It was the scientists, with their questions, their awed rapture at the glory of the created universe, who helped to convert me. In a sense,
A Wrinkle in Time
was my rebuttal to the German theologians. It was also my affirmation of a universe in which I could take note of all the evil and unfairness and horror and yet believe in a loving Creator. I thought of it, at that time, as probably a very heretical book, theologically speaking, which is a delightful little joke at my expense, because it is, I have been told, theologically a completely orthodox book. The Holy Spirit has a definite sense of humour.

I've finally discovered a way to make the point that writing is writing, whether the story is for the chronologically young or old. I give whatever group I am teaching two assignments. The first is to write an incident from their childhood or adolescence which was important to them. “Write in the first person. Nothing cosmic, just an incident. And do not write this for children. Repeat:
Do not write this for children.
Write it for yourselves. Write it for each other.”

When I am giving this assignment as part of a juvenile's workshop at a writer's conference, I will already have read the stories and chapters of books which the conferees have submitted. Thus far, in every case, the work they hand in for this assignment is better than the stories they wrote “for children.”

I repeat, “But you don't write ‘for children.' You write for yourselves. Do you understand how much better this work is than the story you submitted when you were writing ‘for children'?”

The second assignment follows: “Rewrite this story, this time in the third person and from the point of view of someone else in it.”

This is a useful assignment for teaching the beginning writer point of view, and it is not always easy. Often I get wails of, “But I can't!”

One eleventh grader in the class of techniques of fiction I teach at St. Hilda's and St. Hugh's School in New York, wrote a story of her move from the country to the city, to Harlem, when she was seven or eight years old. She was frightened by the tall buildings, the crowded streets, the constant noise of taxi horns and shouting and sirens. So she would escape to the park, where she found an old tree which had branches onto which she could climb. The tree became her friend, her confidante, her solace. At the end of the summer the tree was struck by lightning and felled. She had lost her best friend.

The tree and the child were the only characters in the story. When I gave the second assignment there was the expected, “I can't.”

I gave her no hints. “You can. Use your imagination.”

Her second story, written from the point of view of the tree, was much better than the first, and the class was delighted—and everyone had a glimpse of what imagination can do.

A Catholic priest at the Baptist, Green Lake Writer's Conference in Wisconsin, wrote a story about a man, a fly, and God. We switched the point of view to God in the second assignment and realized that this was a mistake; it would have been better for him to have tried the point of view of the fly.

I can't take credit for these assignments. They were given me by Leonard Ehrlich in the one “creative writing” class we were allowed in college. After graduation, when I went to New York and started sending the stories I had written during my four years at Smith around to various magazines, the result of this second assignment was one of the first to be sold.

From these assignments I will learn everything I need to know about the student's strengths and weaknesses in writing fiction and will have a good idea of where to go next in teaching techniques. I also learn a great deal about the students, which can in itself be helpful. So I gave these two assignments my first two days at Ayia Napa. Many of the eleventh and twelfth graders I teach in New York have had hard lives, come from broken families, have learned too early about anger and death and despair. But I had never read anything like the first assignments I had from the young men and women at Ayia Napa. Edith is married to a Kenyan and is becoming African, but she was born in the U.S. and schooled in an affluent suburb. One day the science teacher at her high school came to talk to the students about evolution. “I can prove we came from monkeys,” he said. “Look at her.” And he pointed at Edith.

Edith's second story, which she wrote from the point of view of the science teacher, was a lesson to me in Christian compassion. The teacher is forgiven, wholly forgiven, because she can look at that experience without feeling the hurt all over again.

Joseph, from Papua New Guinea, wrote about his father's experience as a cook in the Australian army when Joseph was a child. One evening there were fifty extra men, and Joseph's father had not been told they were coming, and he didn't have enough food. So he was beaten by the Australians, and then boiling water was poured over him. The message of Joseph's story was love; it had not been easy for him to learn not to hate Australians, but he had learned. He is married to an Australian, and they have a charming baby. And he has taken hate and turned it to love.

And perhaps that is an essential ingredient of a Christian children's book (or any Christian book): the message of love. A Christian children's book must have an ultimately affirmative view of life.

So a children's book must be, first and foremost, a good book, a book with a young protagonist with whom the reader can identify, and a book which says
yes
to life. Granted, a number of young-adult books have been published with a negative view of life, just as with antiheroes. Again, from all I hear from librarians and teachers, they may be read once, but they are not returned to.

Not long ago a college senior asked if she could talk to me about being a Christian writer. If she wanted to write Christian fiction, how was she to go about it?

I told her that if she is truly and deeply a Christian, what she writes is going to be Christian, whether she mentions Jesus or not. And if she is not, in the most profound sense, Christian, then what she writes is not going to be Christian, no matter how many times she invokes the name of the Lord.

When another young woman told me that she wanted to be a novelist, that she wanted to write novels for Christian women, and asked me how was she to go about it, I wrote back, somewhat hesitantly, that I could not tell her because I do not write my books for either Christians or women. If I understand the gospel, it tells us that we are to spread the Good News to all four corners of the world, not limiting the giving of light to people who already have seen the light. If my stories are incomprehensible to Jews or Muslims or Taoists, then I have failed as a Christian writer. We draw people to Christ not by loudly discrediting what they believe, by telling them how wrong they are and how right we are, but by showing them a light that is so lovely that they want with all their hearts to know the source of it.