Talk, Talk : A Children's Book Author Speaks to Grown-Ups

  When I write for children, I don’t want everything to be an abstract painting. I don’t want everything to be unfamiliar, but I don’t want everything to be familiar either. I want my readers to see reflections of things they know, but I want also to introduce them to something new. Let them find enough familiar symbols so that they will feel at home in my books, but also let them gather together the symbols of a different—or perhaps, broader—reality.

  Let them read about the importance of having a secret inside like Claudia Kincaid in From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. Let them read that being a liberated woman meant to Eleanor of Aquitaine very much what it means to Gloria Steinem—even though the trappings are different. Let them meet a human and uncertain Leonardo da Vinci. Let them read about what can show up when you are invisible, as Jeanmarie and Malcolm are in Up From Jericho Tel.

  As a writer of books for children it is my responsibility to give them words so that they can have the thoughts. Could the Japanese think about truth if they didn’t have a word for it? Can you keep any out-of-sight problem in mind if you don’t have the symbols for it? For most of us those symbols are words. When the words form patterns, we have language.

  I bring all of my adulthood to my writing for children. I make every effort to help children hear the language of my culture, a culture that reaches into the past and stretches over the present. Because language not only tells you the shape of a culture but also helps shape it, I make every effort to expand the perimeter of their language, to set a wider limit to it, to give them a vocabulary for alternatives, perhaps.

  The politician’s lethal weapon, the writer’s principal tool, and Adam’s gift are one and the same: language. Like a weapon, we must keep it accurate; like a tool, we must keep it in good working order; and like a gift, we must cherish it.

  Humpty Dumpty said to Alice:

  “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”

  “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things?”

  “The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that’s all.”

  Which is to be master, indeed. You or the word. Only a Humpty Dumpty can be master by proclamation. The rest of us are fated to learn the territory if we are to rule it. But once learned, we can shape it. We can shape it into something funny or something sad. We can make it show, and we can make it tell, and some of us, some of us who are very lucky, can shape language into books for children—and that is something that my IBM computer cannot do by word processing, and Humpty Dumpty cannot do by proclamation.

  To be able to stand here and talk about language and books and children has been a privilege and a pleasure. I can think of no better way to express my gratitude than by using a gutsy, straightforward, plain Old English word: Thanks.

  Into the 70s

  The representation of blacks and other minorities in children’s books arrived on the heels of the civil-rights movement of the sixties. At this time libraries were still the major market for children’s books. In the mid-1960s the federal government passed legislation making money available for school libraries to stock their shelves. They needed books; tapes and computers were decades away. They needed a variety of books on a variety of subjects. Publishers scrambled to supply the demand. (Although submitted a year apart, my first and second novels both appeared in 1967. Publication of the first had been delayed because printers were catching up with publishers’ orders of backlist titles.) This influx of money from the Great Society produced the first major surge in the number of children’s books being published. The time had come not only for more books but also for books dealing with more subjects.

  Every swelling in the body of permissible subject matter gave birth to a group ready to apply an ice pack. Every new allowable word gave birth to a set of word watchers waiting with Wite-Out.

  Protest groups are as American as the Boston Tea Party.

  Only the agenda changes.

  For example, From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frank-weiler, which was published in the fall of 1967, has as its protagonist a twelve-year-old girl named Claudia who has run away from home. She has taken her brother Jamie with her. She tells him, “I, Claudia Kincaid, want to be different when I go back. Like being a heroine is different.”

  In the year of its publication, one reviewer objected to “a gratuitous reference to drugs in an otherwise pleasing story.”

  The gratuitous reference appears as follows:

  [Claudia and Jamie Kincaid are leaving the Donnell Library in New York, where they have done some research on the works of Michelangelo. Jamie spies a Hershey’s almond bar, still in its wrapper, lying in a corner of the stair landing. He picks it up.]

  “You better not touch it,” Claudia warned. “It’s probably poisoned or filled with marijuana, so you’ll eat it and become either dead or a dope addict.”

  Jamie was irritated. “Couldn’t it just happen that someone dropped it?”

  “I doubt that. Who would drop a whole candy bar and not know it? … Someone put it there on purpose. Someone who pushes dope. I read once that they feed dope in chocolates to little kids, and then the kids become dope addicts. Then these people sell them dope at very high prices which they just can’t help but buy because when you’re addicted you have to have your dope. High prices and all. And Jamie, we don’t have that kind of money.”

  What would that reviewer think about this letter I received in the fall of 1993 from Robert G.?

  … Nice story you wrote about Jamie and Claudia and their Runaway trip. It was the best story Ive heard from you El Konisburg ... I liked when Claudia wants to be a heroine. Now I know that that means a girl hero. I thought That was only a drug. But Now I know that means a girl hero.

  Would the reviewer, who in 1967 was offended by my brief reference to drugs, be equally offended by a young reader who in 1993 needs an explanation for heroine but not heroin? Or would that same reveiwer perhaps have a daughter or granddaughter who in 1993 is a member of the campus feminist group called Womyn of Antioch and is offended by Claudia’s thinking of herself as a heroine instead of a hero? For every one of us who says actress or hostess or priestess, there is a word watcher, ready with Wite-Out and caret, who believes that, be they male or female, the correct words are actor, host, and priest.

  There has always been something to offend someone, and there always will be.

  If it’s not one word, it’s another. If it’s not one subject, it’s another. The subjects change, the words change, and so have the offended. Objections that were once the quirky comments of a single person have become agendas, and nowadays every agenda has behind it a group ready to mount a protest.

  Throughout the years of my incumbency as a writer, protest groups have changed not only what they fight but how they fight. As soon as they reach a certain critical mass, they need an office, a staff, and a spokesperson. Spokespersons, too, have changed. Whereas they were once the leaders who rose from the grassroots organization, that is no longer the case. Nowadays, like it or not, spokespersons arise full-grown and go to the head of an interest group, not necessarily out of conviction. Like the knights of the middle ages, there are some who will defend whatever cause pays their way. They’ve become hired guns.

  Take the case of Candy Lightner. In 1980, Ms. Lightner’s thirteen-year-old daughter was killed by a drunk driver in a hit-and-run accident. She founded the organization MADD, Mothers Against Drunk Driving. By 1985 the organization had a national membership of thousands and a budget of more than $10 million. That year, Ms. Lightner, as their chief executive, requested a $10,000 bonus over the $76,000 she earned; however, earlier that year MADD was criticized for spending too much on fundraising and too little on programs, and Ms. Lightner was fired.

  On January 15, 1994, the New York Times carried an article under the headline “Founder of Anti-Drunk-Driving Group Now Lobbies for Breweries.”

&
nbsp; … after years of working for stiffer drunk-driving laws, Ms. Lightner is now lobbying against laws that would lower the standard blood-alcohol reading at which it becomes illegal to drive …

  Ms. Lightner said that she saw nothing strange in her decision to join a lobbying group that represents the American Beverage Institute.

  If one considers that a free lance needs a cause, one can agree with Ms. Lightner. The important principle is not the agenda; the important principle is that there be sides to an agenda. And in that way, these protest groups have become divisive. They must maintain divisiveness if they are to be paid to do away with it.

  In 1976, the year of our nation’s bicentennial, the year Painting a Novel for Children was written, special interest groups were proliferating and drawing up new agendas.

  3. Painting a Novel for Children

  Among the battery of tests my husband gives to persons he assesses for hiring or promotion is a test called the TAT, the Thematic Apperception Test. This test consists of asking a person taking the test to write a story about each of a number of pictures. The pictures—sometimes of people, sometimes of landscapes—are all, to some degree, ambiguous. He also asks the person being evaluated to assign titles to their stories.

  Over the years some of the people taking the test have asked David what he does with their stories when he is finished with them, and David’s standard reply is: I give the good ones to my wife.

  Well, he doesn’t.

  He doesn’t ever let me read them. Not even the sexy ones.

  And he won’t tell me the titles. He says that my own titles have caused trouble enough already. Kids can neither pronounce nor spell them, and he can hardly remember them. David says that if I want to see the stories told from the TAT cards, I should take the test myself. He would administer it. I tell him no. I have told him no for all the years we have been married. I will continue to tell him no forever. I also refuse to take the Rorschach.

  David tells the story about the man taking the Rorschach who interpreted each of the inkblots in a very libidinous manner. When the tester said, “You seem, sir, to find a sexual connotation in everything,” the man replied, “Well, it’s your fault for showing me all those dirty pictures.”

  There is a lively connection between pictures and books. I don’t mean picture books. I mean the connection between the art of painting a picture and the art of writing a book. There is a relationship between the way in which an artist uses his tools and the way in which a novelist uses his.

  I would like to explore those parallels with you. I would like to make graphic the connection between a visible work of art—a painting—and a verbal work, a novel—most particularly, a novel for children.

  Years ago, when I first started to write, I would go to work in the mornings as soon as my children left for school. When they came home for lunch, I would read them what I had written. Laurie, my daughter who was eight at the time, began a set of illustrations for the story I was writing and reading in installments, the story that became the novel Jennifer, Hecate, Macbeth, William McKinley and Me, Elizabeth. I saved those drawings, and I happen to have one right here.

  This is our heroine, Elizabeth, finding a note on the Jennifer tree.

  I was, of course, charmed by Laurie’s effort. I told her that I liked her drawing very much. I did. I still do. But being the ex-teacher/ever-mother, I also told her that the sky should come all the way down to the ground.

  She looked up at me and answered, “Nope. I’ve been there, and it doesn’t.”

  Thus my young artist summarized with the tools she was given the world as she knew it. And what were those tools—other than crayons and paper? They were line, color, and an idea. The idea was not her own; she was, after all, doing an illustration of someone else’s thought, but with line and color she had made something personal of it. She had given someone else’s idea a personal style. Style is not a basic tool, but it does lend a touch of class.

  A writer of fiction uses the same basic tools as my daughter did. A writer of fiction uses line; we call it plot. But it is essentially the same thing: how do we get from here to there in our story? He uses color; we call it characterization. And he uses an idea; we call it theme. All of these materials—line, color, idea; plot, characterization, theme—serve to give form to the world as the writer/artist sees it.

  An interesting phenomenon of this century has been the fragmentation of these tools both in the graphic arts and in fiction. Let me show you some fragments, some parallels between modern art and modern fiction.

  Here is an artist, Henri Matisse, who has chosen to use only a single tool: line.

  Do we still have a work of art? I would say yes.

  Just as in the Middle Ages astrolabes were both tools and works of art, so can this single tool, line, be a work of art.

  But what don’t we have? Obviously, we don’t have shading, and we don’t have depth. We have something that is often executed quickly and experienced quickly. We have, in effect, a quick read. We have, however, the right to bring to this line drawing whatever depths we choose. Layers of meaning can be added at our discretion and within our ability to do so. The artist has left us a lot of white space to fill in as we choose. In times past, such line drawings were considered preliminary to the final work, a sharpening of one’s tools, so to speak.

  Suppose a person chooses to write in the manner that this painting was done. Suppose a writer chooses to use line—story line or plot. What do we have? We have mysteries. We have thrillers. We have books that move swiftly from scene to scene, each one advancing the story line. We have books that skim and are skimmed. In their limited way, they, too, are works of art. They are often executed quickly, but they take enormous skill. And there is a place for these two-dimensional, line-drawing books. They fill a real need. Let me give you an example.

  My husband and I were returning to the East Coast of the United States from Japan. As we were boarding the plane, I noticed a woman who had an Agatha Christie tucked inside her lightweight net carry-on. I had one tucked inside mine. I had The ABC Murders and she had Nemesis. I finished my Christie as well as The Day of the Condor, another line drawing. I am not a speed reader—it is a long flight—and I went searching for her. Holding out The ABC Murders, I asked, “Can we negotiate a trade?” “Oh, my dear,” she said, “I fell asleep and haven’t finished mine.” Her husband looked up and said, “Would you consider trading an Agatha Christie for a Rex Stout?” I would. We traded. Thus, we both had a story line to get us from East to West.

  One year I drove a car pool with a bunch of sixth-graders in the rear seat who spent the time from home to school and back again trading Hardy Boys and Nancy Drews. These straight-line plot books have charted the path for many travels for many ages and age levels.

  Line-drawing books can decorate our minds just as line drawings can decorate our office walls. As suspenseful, as tension-producing as they may be, they represent escape from tension. There is never any worry for the reader about “getting the point.” The story is the point. A person putting down an intricately plotted novel doesn’t worry about whether or not he got the author’s message. The medium is the message.

  When a person writes for children, she must give them this part of her art. For decoration, of course, but also for the young readers’ self-assurance. That way, the most timid and the most reluctant reader can put the book down and think: I got from there, the beginning, to here, the end. As a writer of children’s books, I never underestimate the sense of satisfaction a child gets from having finished. A plotline is the best means of hanging a tale.

  Sometimes a line drawing gets colored.

  When that happens, we have The Great Parade by Fernand Leger.

  What is a colored plotline? A story with a strong plot, but one that contains characters that have some dimension. When finished, a reader feels that she has enjoyed meeting the characters and has been more involved with what is happening to them as contrasted to what is happ
ening. I think of the mysteries of Josephine Tey for this kind of reading, and of her works, The Daughter of Time comes first to mind.

  What if we have only color and no line? We have then character sketches and mood pieces. We have, for example, that bright and jittery piece by J. D. Salinger called Seymour: An Introduction.

  Look at this work called Composition by Wassily Kandinsky.

  He has used color exclusively and loosely. Close your eyes.

  How much of this painting can you remember?

  Where were the blues and where were the reds?

  Compare your short-term memory of this painting with that of The Great Parade. The Great Parade certainly lacked depth, but the strong black lines helped to give the painting a focus and helped to stamp it in your memory.

  When writing for adults, a person can use a single tool effectively and with style, but it has staying power only for sophisticated tastes. Children do not qualify. I think that writing pieces using only colors—even primary colors—is like painting a child into a corner that is papered with fiction from The New Yorker. Most children need a story as a towline to drag them—they often are dragged—from one splash of color to the next.

  Here is an artist, Georges Braque, who is consumed with getting across an idea. That was the raison d’etre of the art form called Cubism, of which this picture, called Fruit Dish and Cards, is representative.

  Braque, who along with Pablo Picasso invented Cubism, wanted to show objects, landscapes, and people as many-faceted solids, thus reducing all their subjects to a network of angles and planes. and it is clear how much alike work that is in service to an idea begins to look.