From the September/October 2005 issue of The Horn Book Magazine

Wishful Thinking

By Sarah Ellis

slot myself into seat 17A. With my seatbelt fitting snugly about my hips and my cabin baggage safely stowed, I turn to 17B for the requisite exchange of information, after which we can politely retreat to our own magazines, headphones, and packages of pretzels. “What do you do?” 17B asks. Brightly I reply, “I write children’s books.” Even as there is a pause, I anticipate his follow-up question. Here it is: “Do you illustrate them yourself?”

Why, oh why, does John Q. Public think that all children’s books are picture books? In a doomed and foolish moment of evangelism I decide to educate 17B. “Actually, my books don’t have pictures; they are novels for children.” 17B looks blank. Over the years I have tried to explain to countless people on planes and at family gatherings the nature of juvenile fiction. I have met with a singular lack of success. I have become grumpy on this subject. I whine. At writers’ festivals why are children’s fiction writers not represented on fiction panels? Why does a journal article on the contemporary Canadian novel ignore Brian Doyle? How come writers of juvenile fiction don’t get to sit at the grownups’ table with Anne Tyler and Ian McEwan?

Recently, though, I’ve had that most refreshing of experiences, a change of mind. What if I’m wrong about my gang? Maybe we’re not at that table because it’s not where we belong. What about if my tradition is actually not that of the novelist but rather something older and wilder? What about if fiction writers for children, in all their variety, are really properly seated at a table that includes a lot of anonymous people, like grandmothers telling stories and bards singing tales and pilgrims shortening their roads with narrative and kids singing jump-rope songs and parodies of advertising jingles? What about if my table is really the fairy-tale table?

This is a liberating idea. It shakes loose from their moorings two myths I have held unquestioningly since library school (and that inform my approach as I labor in the fields of librarianship to this day). Truth one is: “Good children’s books are not didactic.” Truth two is: “Good children’s books must contain hope.”

The received wisdom on didacticism is that early children’s books were didactic, but now we’ve learned better and our books are not didactic. In the balance of instruction and delight, we have moved very far, at least we pretend we have, toward delight and away from instruction. Didactic is not a word you want to see in a review of one of your books.

The problem with this truth is that it is so patently false. Children’s books are didactic. Children’s books promote the values of our time as surely as did those of the seventeenth-century Puritans. As Roger Sutton (quoted by Frances Fitzgerald in a 2004 Harper’s article) has said, outing the naked emperor, “Adults want to communicate good values to the next generation, or they want to give kids help and guidance, so they write differently than they do for adults. They can’t help it.”

Why can’t we help it? I think it has something to do with our relationship to our readers. Partly we are just on their side, against adult power, condescension, inconsistency, absurdity, and the injustices of the world. We are on their side in favor of taking child emotion seriously, in favor of the power of imagination.

But we’re not just their pals and champions. We are also their parents. We want to protect, encourage, and inspire our child readers. I’m very uncomfortable using those words. Those are words that often appear on publicity for dreadful books. But it is nonetheless true.

Fairy tales are unblushingly didactic. Fairy tales are about ethics and behavior. They exist to lick the young into shape. In his book The Truth about Stories, First Nations writer and scholar Thomas King investigates the concept of story from the point of view of someone with direct links to an oral culture. He ends each of his six essays with a variation on the same refrain: “Take [this story]. It’s yours. Do with it what you will. But don’t say in the years to come that you would have lived your life differently if only you had heard this story. You’ve heard it now.”

Juvenile fiction is not a matter of didactic or not didactic. It is a matter of artful or clumsy. It’s a matter of intelligent and respectful of the reader or preachy. When a review says that a book is didactic, what they really mean is that it isn’t very good, that it is ham-fisted, maladroit, lacking in subtlety, that it takes the easy, obvious way out of a sticky narrative problem or a difficult emotional or social issue. Writing children’s fiction is not a matter of standing on principle; it is a matter of crafting good, honest art.

ITTING DOWN AT the fairy-tale table, I also took a fresh look at the hoary question of children’s fiction and hope. On this subject a passage from Marina Warner’s From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers made me pause. She writes: “Fairy tales are not passive or active; their mood is optative — announcing what might be.” The optative mood is not one that occurs in the English language. The closest thing we come to it is when we say something like, “Oh, would that it were so.” Our phrase wishful thinking also comes close. A quick google of the word optative reveals three clusters of references — Attic Greek, First Nations languages, and J. R. R. Tolkien, who has an optative mood in the Elvish language. The optative mood is obviously deeply allied to storytelling. What it seems to convey is some kind of third way beyond determinism and free will, beyond optimism and pessimism, beyond hope and despair.

Great children’s fiction finds this mood, this third way. In Jill Paton Walsh’s Unleaving, one of my benchmark juvenile novels, a disabled child is killed, swept off a high cliff. There is an ambiguous possibility that her brother was responsible for her death. It is hard to think of a more morally fraught, tragic, painful element in a book. And yet the total flavor of the book is life-enhancing, joyful, loving. How does Paton Walsh do this? How does she find this third way? She finds it by subtle, intelligent, rhythmical writing, by the fresh use of metaphor, by emotional honesty, by a crisp evocation of a particular landscape, and by an almost magical ability to enter the minds of human animals at a certain stage in their development. She finds it by the artful construction of a fictional world, a fictional world in the optative mood.

EELING INCREASINGLY comfortable at the fairy-tale table, I glance over at the novelists’ table. It is quiet. They are all scribbling. At my table they are all talking. You have to be a good talker to get a word in edgewise at the fairy-tale table. At the fairy-tale table you have to have rhythm. Who’s that trio over at the far corner? Kipling, Singer, and Farjeon.

“Hear and attend and listen; for this befell and behappened and became and was, O my Best Beloved.”

“The devil licked his singed tail and ran off with his wife to the land where no people walk, no cattle tread, where the sky is copper and the earth is iron.”

“Did you ever hear the tale of the Six Princesses who lived for the sake of their hair alone?”

Floating along on the music of all this talk, I realize something obvious. Juvenile novels need to work in the air as well as on the page. Sometimes that’s because a teacher or a parent is reading aloud. Sometimes that’s because some of our readers still move their lips or say the words out loud in their head as they read. Always it is because our readers are very close to the time of nursery rhymes, to a world where movement, rhythm, language, and story are inextricably linked.

So what do I think I’m doing when I write fiction for children?

Artful teaching, wishful thinking, dancing the words along the page, that’s what I think I’m doing. Who are my true colleagues? At the moment I’m pulling my chair up to the fairy-tale table. But what to do about 17B? Life is short. On my next flight I’m just going to self-declare as a librarian. And in response to the question that declaration always begs, Yes, I do love to read.

When she’s not in seat 17A, Sarah Ellis is a general-dogsbody librarian at the North Vancouver District Public Library, a critic, a reviewer, and the author of juvenile fiction. Secret: she writes picture books, too. Her latest is The Queen’s Feet, published this fall by Red Deer Press.