From the March/April 2003 issue of The Horn Book Magazine

The Writer's Page
Narrative and Violence

By Jennifer Armstrong

ere in the world of children’s literature, we are pretty cozy. Olivia has saved the circus. Eloise still lives at the Plaza. We’ve made way for ducklings for sixty years, and kept Max’s supper hot for forty. The dark has risen and been held back, and worlds have been joined by a subtle knife. Our work is rich and fulfilling and good. I imagine we all feel that we are engaged in a meaningful, valuable enterprise. We like our books and our world of children’s literature.

But out there in the rest of the world, things are going to hell. A year after September 11 and the anthrax scare, Washington D.C. and surrounding areas were once again white-knuckled with fear, held at gunpoint by a pair of snipers. I got an e-mail from a friend, saying her Maryland granddaughter’s fourth-grade class was having an ice-cream party as a reward because they’d done so well with code blue — total lockdown. In a one-week period I marveled at the following: in my hometown I marched in an antiwar rally and watched a man lean out of a passing van to yell, “Kill them all!” North Korea admitted it has nuclear weapons capability. Chechen rebels held hostages in a Moscow theater. Congo seemed ready to erupt again into violence worthy of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. When I say the world is going to hell, it seems to be almost literally true.

So what earthly use is there, you might ask, in dwelling in the rarefied atmosphere of children’s literature? What good do our books do against such chaos, fear, and death? One way to answer this, of course, is that without civilization our lives are simply animal existence. Civilization is what we are trying to preserve. Literature and the arts are one of the principal means of creating and transmitting civilization. Literature for children is where this transmission begins — and where it must begin if civilization is going to be preserved. Supporting a world of young readers means that the adults making decisions years from now will be civilized adults; our work is desperately urgent. We have leaders to create.

Many times in the year since 9/11, at writers’ conferences and gatherings, I have heard colleagues refer to the impossibility of writing after the attack, that they felt their work was trivial in light of the tragedy, that they were paralyzed by feelings of futility. Each time this sentiment was expressed I felt a pang of shame, because I experienced no such feelings of triviality or futility. I wondered if I was insufficiently sympathetic and sensitive, a monster of self-absorption. But no matter how many times I looked at it, I just couldn’t see it that way. If anything, I wanted to work even more, write even more. Not about the sorrow and loss and heartbreak; it was too soon and much too confusing. I certainly wanted to give — blood, food, money — but I didn’t want to give up. It never occurred to me to stop writing.

Because don’t we need more books, not fewer? It seems to me this attack was the work of people who think that one particular book is all they need. It seems to me that we’ve seen countless crimes over the centuries committed by people who believe that the Bible, or the Koran, or a political manifesto, or some other single text is the only book they need. “I don’t need to read anything more than what I’ve already read” is an extremely alarming attitude. The first chore of tyrannies and despotisms is always to restrict and control what the public reads, what books they can share and discuss, what newspapers can print, how many people can assemble to exchange ideas, what authors can write. Books are the enemy of violent zealotry.

I repeat the obvious when I say that books give us access to multiple points of view. Stories, biographies, histories all encourage us to imagine one fork in the road after another, paths to an infinite number of choices, outcomes, consequences. Confronted with a library, who believes in a fated destiny? Without access to such ideas, who can avoid one?

On the occasions when I’ve taught fiction workshops in upper elementary school grades, I have observed a common decision among students — usually boys, I’m afraid — who have little or no experience in creating narratives. They can start a story easily enough. They bound forward with gusto. But when they are faced with the inevitable need for a resolution to their story, they can’t imagine an outcome, can’t project themselves into the future from where they stand at that moment. Frustration and futility result, and the only way to get the story over with is to bring on destruction and chaos — guns, explosions, alien spaceships with powerful weapons blowing everything to bits just so they can bring the curtain down on the drama they have set in motion. They haven’t learned to speculate about possible consequences; they haven’t learned that taking this or the other path can lead to an infinite number of destinations. A very informal survey I took of teachers suggests that my observations were not unique, and that the more experience a student had with narrative, i.e., the more stories that student read, the less likely he was to come to a dead stop while making up a story. The students with little reading experience — little story reading experience, I should say — had the hardest time making up stories and finding resolutions to them.

When older, these same students may be faced with real obstacles in their lives that they can’t see resolutions for, and bring real guns to school, and blow it all up simply to force a conclusion. In the aftermath of Columbine, school massacres have made me wonder if a failure of narrative imagination is behind this explosive impulse.

When people say that boys do read, but they just like to read things besides books — things besides richly textured narratives — they imply that all kinds of reading are equally valuable. I’m not so sure that’s so. Narrative is a string of decisions, reactions, consequences: first this happens, leading to this next thing, which opens the option of either this or that possibility, one of which will lead to happiness, another to tragedy. Practice in reading stories and practice in writing stories may be one of the best ways to learn that there are many possible outcomes to every set of circumstances.

So books matter. The intellectual exercise of reading one word after another, turning the pages until the end, listening to the voice of the author and considering the ideas and opinions presented therein, is a manifestly civilized activity. Reading, no matter how chaotic the subject matter, is by nature orderly, respectful, open-minded. A reader must have patience, because a book cannot be experienced all at once. A reader must have memory, in order to associate the ending of the book with what has gone before. A reader must be receptive, in order to entertain the ideas formed in a stranger’s imagination. Patience, memory, receptivity — these may not be the most glamorous virtues, but they are virtues indispensable to a civilized society. As creators of books, we must always endeavor to create something worthy of that patience, worth remembering, worth receiving. Children’s patience, memory, and receptivity must be rewarded with literature that enlarges their spirits and intellects. Young readers need to practice writing narratives, not persuasive essays to meet state language arts standards. And they need more books to read, more stories to exercise their narrative imaginations on, not fewer. So I want to say to my writer colleagues: please, friends, back to your desks. This work isn’t trivial in the face of violence. It may be our very best defense. The tyrants and despots want to restrict what we write — don’t, whatever you do, impose those restrictions on yourselves.

Jennifer Armstrong is the author of novels, picture books, and nonfiction books for children and young adults. Her most recent books are the Fire-us Trilogy, from HarperCollins. She lives in Saratoga Springs, New York.