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A favorite quote of mine from G. K. Chesterton is, “Children are innocent and love justice, while we [adults] are wicked and prefer mercy.”
I came across this quote while I was writing my first book, WHO TOOK MY HAIRY TOE? There is a definite bit of justice at the end of that book—a bit of justice I find most of my elementary school age readers love as I present this book during school visits. I think this highlights an important thing to remember about young readers—they often see the world in black and white.
The other day I was watching a girl of about four helping her father in the grocery store. They were in the check-out lane ahead of me. Father could do nothing right. “No,” said the girl. “This is how it goes. Mama puts all the cans together . . .” I could tell that no matter what he did Dad was not gonna win, because there was a definite right and wrong way to unload the grocery cart in this child’s mind.
I keep this thought at the forefront of my mind when I work on the endings of my picture books. Young children are still learning about themselves and their place in the world. For them, the good guys win and the bad guys lose. That’s just the way it is—very black and white.
It is only as kids grow older that they venture into realms of gray with some degree of confidence. By middle school, more open-ended conclusions are acceptable. Readers at this age are learning that life does not always obey the rules, it’s messy. The bad guys sometimes get away with it—at least for the moment.
However, the unwritten rule for writers of fiction for middle schoolers and younger “young adults,” is there needs to be some ray of hope woven into the story—even if it’s just a flicker of a smile, a hand clasped, or a fist pumped. The bad guys, we assume—after the story has finished—do not get away with it for long.
We (if you’ve got a middle-schooler living in your brain, as I do) need to be on the winning side. After all, we are often not the besparkled popular kids in school, nor the ones chosen first for sports teams—if we’re chosen at all. Reading at this point in our lives is important for its ability to empower us. It seeds our dreams, making us more than mere middle school losers.
By the time we’re entering adulthood, we can read, and love, books with no ending whatsoever. We understand that, yeah, some of the bad guys do get off. And there are some things we are just never going to know. Scarlett and Rhett—who can say?
Hopefully, as adults, we have grown out of seeing the world in terms of black and white. Hopefully, we can embrace the chaotic Jackson Pollock-colored world where, if we’re lucky, we pull out a ribbon of color and go bravely forth armed with a sense of right tempered by mercy, molded by experience, and fired with a passion to always be open to another’s point of view.
And point of view? Really, isn’t that what all books are about? In the end, the pen is always mightier than the sword.
Happy Reading!
Shutta
Posted in December, 2007
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