Make Believe

This morning was a total stinker. I woke up with a dull headache, teeth grinding, fists clenched. Sometimes my body becomes haunted, a vessel for a thing ; total and all consuming. It could be a conversation the day before or a problem I’m trying to solve, it doesn’t really matter what that the thing is. These moments suck because it feels like I’m trapped inside my body with no way out but it’s extra annoying because the remedy is always so predictable and boring: stop work, find the nearest ocean, push my limp body up that hill, return to literature and books, books, books.

But when I woke up this morning I didn’t know that Make Believe: On Telling Stories to Children by Mac Barnett was the antidote. Because, dear reader, let me tell you: this book is only-the-finest-punk-rock-remedy for my bad brain goo.

Mac’s a children’s writer and in Make Believe he argues that these books aren’t a silly genre, they’re a form we should treat seriously and respect. Meaning, books for children aren’t a lesser kind of literature simply because they’re for children. In fact, Mac argues, there’s an awful lot we can learn about the world from children, too:

...what are “childish enthusiasms” but the ability to see the world with the freshness and wonder that literature requires? The child who stares and marvels at the workings of a garbage truck sees the garbage truck better than adults do. The kid who breathlessly recounts horse facts, who finds it overwhelming that such an amazing creature actually exists, is correct.

Mac continues:

Since the invention of the printing press, children’s books have been a battleground between those who want to tell kids what to do and those who want to tell them stories. [...] adults often expect children’s books to reinforce the prerogative of parents or priests or school principals. Most often, we confuse writers with teachers.

I hate it when stories have treacly moral lessons as an adult, too. I like the complexity! The unknown bits of a story, the blurry edges that are impossible to put into words. So why should kids literature be any different?

Rather than pushing a moral, good fiction invites the reader to make meaning. A moral is an immutable lesson, intentionally encoded into a story by the author, meant to be inscribed on the child’s brain. Meaning, though, is created collaboratively...

I could do this all day, quoting big chunks and spoiling every page of Mac’s very charming, very funny little book. Thankfully, Mac has a newsletter too that I’m now utterly obsessed by. Take this fantastic piece about Where the Wild Things Are for example:

MAC: As Max is crowned “king of all wild things” the pictures get even bigger, and that white bar shrinks, until we come to maybe the most famous sentence in any picture book: “‘And now,’ cried Max, ‘let the wild rumpus start.’” The rumpus is three glorious full-bleed, two-page illustrations. The white space is gone. There are no words.

(These are called “wordless spreads.”)

JON: After all, what would you write? A bunch of sounds? It’s so much louder this way.