The love for children

I was talk­ing to a woman today, and she, not know­ing that I was a writer of books for young peo­ple, was telling me about the sto­ries she made up for her grand­child. “My grand­daugh­ter so loves my sto­ries,” she told me, “I’m think­ing of send­ing them in and get­ting them published.”

It remind­ed me of anoth­er con­ver­sa­tion I had years ago with a min­is­ter. “My wife,” he said, “is look­ing for some­thing to do in her spare time, some­thing that would earn some mon­ey. She loves kids. You write books for kids. Think you could tell her how to write them?”

Or the teacher who told me she had writ­ten a long poem about talk­ing flow­ers and her stu­dents “loved it. I’m think­ing of hav­ing it pub­lished. Who is the best publisher?”

Note that the word “love,” appears here often. In part, then, these com­ments are about the love for chil­dren. More pow­er to these good folks.

But good children’s books have a built in con­tra­dic­tion, some­thing embed­ded in George Bernard Shaw’s com­ment that, “Hard writ­ing makes easy reading.”

The more the writer works to make the read­ing of the text flow with grace and ease, the more the read­er merges with your sto­ry, the more the read­er takes the expe­ri­ence in the book and makes it her/his own expe­ri­ence, the more suc­cess­ful the book.

Which is to say, the bet­ter the writer, the more the writer seems not to be there. I sus­pect that’s one of the rea­sons so many peo­ple want to write books for kids. They love the kids. Good. They don’t think of the writ­ing. Not good.