Name: Make Believe
Author: Mac Barnett

Introduction

What’s in it for me? The serious business of make believe

Most people think writing for children means writing down. Simpler words, simpler feelings, a story with the corners sanded off and a moral tacked onto the end. The best children's writers know much better than to write this kind of tale.

Really excellent children’s stories aren’t easy, even when they seem simple on first read. But they do trust their reader: with strange structures, with feelings that don't resolve, with endings that refuse to explain themselves.

This Blink will examine some of those stories and how and why they work. You’ll hear about a girl whose notebook gets her shunned by everyone she loves. A bedroom that turns into a forest that turns into a land where wildness reigns. A goodnight that's said to nobody.

And by the end, you'll understand exactly what it takes to write a book a child won't just read once, but return to again and again. Are you ready? Then let’s begin.

Key idea 1 of 7

Children are better readers than adults

Here's the problem with a lot of children's books. They're written by an adult who thinks it's their job to teach a child to read.

But children know more about reading than adults do.

Okay – kids might not know that the letters s and h together make the sound sh, or that a silent e at the end of a word makes the vowel in its middle say its own name. But if you're reading to a child – or writing for one – and you think you're the one who knows what's happening on the page, well… you've got another thing coming.

Try it.

Sit down and read to a child. Do it for long enough and you'll see what's actually happening. You're the one holding the book. You're the one decoding the words. You're the one doing the voices. But sooner or later the child stops you – and points at a detail in the picture you'd skated straight past that cracks open a whole new level of the story. Or they ask a question that goes to the very heart of a character you thought you had figured out. Or, simply and succinctly, they sum up the hidden philosophy underpinning the story.

We assume that because a child can't yet tell you the letters b-a-n-a-n-a spell banana, they can't read. And because we assume they can't read, we hand them primers. Books made with simple words, simpler stories, and sentences like:

Jane sees the dog. The dog is big. The big dog runs.

And when a child won't connect with these books, we decide reading must be too hard for them. Have you ever met a five-year-old? Climbing a ten-foot tree is not too hard for a five-year-old. Wriggling out of eating any vegetable at all, ever, is not too hard for a five-year-old. And Jane sees the dog is definitely not too hard for a five-year-old. It isn't hard. It's dull. Dull for a five-year-old – and, for that matter, for a reader of any age.

So when you write for children, remember who you're writing for: people who can already read, in every way that matters. The decoding is the easy part, and it'll come. What you owe them is a reason to want to decode the words on the page. Don't write Jane sees the dog. Write something they'd climb a tree to get to.

Key idea 2 of 7

Make believe is important

Who’s doing more sophisticated thinking: an adult, balancing their taxes for the year, or a child pretending a bunch of grapes is a hat?

Adults tend to treat make-believe play, of the grapes-as-hat variety, as a developmental phase that children will grow out of once they learn how to think in a serious, tax-balancing, kind of way. Actually, make believe is far more serious and sophisticated than most of the thinking that adults engage in.

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Key idea 3 of 7

The moral is not the point

Did you hear the story about the tortoise and the hare? Odds are you don’t remember the anticipation of wondering who will win, the delight at the tortoise’s unexpected and underdog win. All you remember is the clunking moral at the end: ‘Slow and steady wins the race’.

Some adults think that morals are the point of a children’s story. Every child knows otherwise: that a moral shuts the fun down.

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Key idea 4 of 7

Celebrate wildness

Children's literature does more with less. Take the great masterpieces of adult literature: George Eliot's Middlemarch clocks in at a cool 880 pages. Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace could do double duty in a weights training routine. But one of the true classics of children's literature is 140 words long. Not pages. Words. The whole story consists of ten sentences and takes about four minutes to read out loud.

I'm talking, of course, about Where the Wild Things Are. On the surface it's a story about a boy who gets sent to his room and imagines a wild adventure on an island populated by Wild Things. Underneath it's a story about rage and loneliness and comfort. Thematically, then, it's in the same league as Tolstoy.

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Key idea 5 of 7

Get comfortable with strangeness

If I say the words ‘comb’ ‘brush’ and ‘bowl of mush’ to you, there’s a good chance you’ve just conjured up in your mind the iconic green bedroom of Margaret Wise Brown’s picture book Goodnight Moon. This is a book with a structure so clean, you’d be forgiven for thinking it was simple. The first half of the story names the objects in a room. The second half says goodnight to them. It seems as tidy and ordered as a well-honed bedtime routine. Except that, looking closer, it’s as mysterious and disorienting as the process of giving in to sleep and dreams.

Brown doesn't say goodnight to everything she named. And she says goodnight to things she never mentioned at all. The structure that felt so reassuring turns out to be full of holes.It’s disorienting. The way that darkness and nighttime and sleep can feel disorienting when you are a small child alone in a big bed.

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Key idea 6 of 7

Be deliberate with design

A caterpillar hatches. He eats a lot of food. He builds a cocoon. He becomes a butterfly. This is the plot of The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle. When you just look at the plot, it's hard to understand why this particular picture book has sold 50 million copies.

But when you look at the book itself, you understand. Most picture books treat the form as a container – words and pictures arranged between two covers. The Very Hungry Caterpillar understands that a picture book is also an object: something a child holds, turns, touches, and physically interacts with. And it uses that physicality as part of the story.

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Key idea 7 of 7

Write with children in mind

Being a child is hard. Every day brings a room you've never been in before, with rules nobody explains; it could be a new classroom, a new teacher, or dinner at a friend's house where everything is done differently and you don't know why. On top of all this newness, children are having enormous feelings they don't yet have words for – jealousy, boredom, contempt, dread, a love for someone that suddenly tips into hatred and back again before lunch. A book can't make any of that easier. But it can do something better; it can show a child that the difficulty and the big feelings are real, and worth taking seriously.

So don't write at them. Don't construct a story toward a lesson and then announce what it was. Children recognise this immediately and they hate it.

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Make Believe summary