Madeleine L'Engle Herself

by Madeleine L'engle

  HONOR THE INTUITION OF CHILDREN

  If I have something I want to say that is too difficult for adults to swallow, then I will write it in a book for children….Children still haven’t closed themselves off with fear of the unknown, fear of revolution, or the scramble for security. They are still familiar with the inborn vocabulary of myth. It was adults who thought that children would be afraid of the Dark Thing in Wrinkle, not children, who understand the need to see thingness, non-ness, and to fight it.

  THE CHILD WITHIN RECOGNIZES TRUTH

  Perhaps it is the child within us who is able to recognize the truth of story—the mysterious, the numinous, the unexplainable, and the grownup within us who accepts these qualities with joy but understands that we also have responsibilities, that a promise is to be kept, homework is to be done, that we owe other people courtesy and consideration, and that we need to help care for our planet because it’s the only one we’ve got.

  I never want to lose the story-loving child within me, or the adolescent, or the young woman, or the middle-aged one, because all together they help me to be fully alive on this journey, and show me that I must be willing to go where it takes me, even through the valley of the shadow.

  NURTURE VISION AND IMAGINATION

  One of the gravest dangers is the loss of the distinction between vision and delusion. Far too often today children are taught, both in school and at home, to equate truth with fact. If we can’t understand something and dissect it with our conscious minds, then it isn’t true. In our anxiety to limit ourselves to that which we can comprehend definitively, we are losing all that is above, beyond, below, through, past, over that small area encompassed by our conscious minds.

  The result of this artificial limitation is rebellion. The destructive rebellion is the most apparent—the alarming rise in the number of juvenile delinquents, the school dropouts, the continuing dependence on drugs. But there is also constructive rebellion on the part of our kids, as in their rediscovery of fairy tale, fantasy, myth; needlework and stained glass and ceramics; dancing and singing and baroque music; surely their passion for the Pachelbel canon is a passion for order in a disordered world. And they love the combination of order and delight in a Bach fugue.

  PREPARATION FOR THE REAL WORLD

  A story where myth, fantasy, fairy tale, or science fiction explore and ask questions moves beyond fragmatic dailiness to wonder. Rather than taking the child away from the real world, such stories are preparation for living in the real world with courage and expectancy. A child who has been denied imaginative literature is likely to have far more difficulty in understanding cellular biology or post-Newtonian physics than the child whose imagination has already been stretched by reading fantasy and science fiction.

  BURIED TREASURE

  When I think of the children’s books I love best, I realize that they’re written on a great many different levels. Now the first level is story. A good children’s book must hold the reader’s interest. It must be first and foremost a good story that will make the reader keep wanting to go on turning the pages. But underneath that good story is buried treasure. No one person will find all of the treasure, but each will discover special joys.

  THE UNIQUE PERSPECTIVE OF OUR CHILD SELVES

  One of the greatest privileges of writing a children’s book is that we write out of our child selves but with all that chronology has taught us. I’m often asked if I write about my own children. No, that is not really possible. I have to write out of myself. You can take your eight-year-old self, your twelve-year-old self, your sixteen-year-old self and put it anywhere in any time or place. The only real characters that insisted on coming into my books have been Rob Austin and Canon Tallis. Rob has now grown into the tall young man who was holding his grandmother when she died.

  HUMAN CHARACTERS

  The great children’s books are those which most fully accept our fallible humanness. We’re so familiar with Alice that we tend to forget what a snobbish little nasty brat she was. And truly Mary in The Secret Garden is as nastily human a child as anyone could find. Hans Christian Andersen deals with death, the death of the body but worse, the death of the heart—the death of the body of the little match girl, the death of the heart in the Snow Queen.

  THE OPENNESS OF CHILDREN

  Nothing makes a serious writer of children’s books hotter around the collar than the assumption that you write for children because it’s easier or because you can’t make it in the adult field. You write for children on significant topics if you’re a serious writer because children are willing to accept theological and philosophical concepts that the adult will not accept. Children are willing to go into this world of darkness that is on the other side of critical fact, with open minds. They’re still brave. They still have courage.

  NO THEORY IS TOO HARD FOR A CHILD

  One of the reasons that A Wrinkle in Time took so long to find a publisher is that it was assumed that children would not be able to understand the sophisticated way of looking at time. Or not understand Einstein’s theories. But no theory is too hard for a child, as long as it is part of a story. And although parents and teachers had not been taught Einstein’s E=MC2 in school, the kids had.

  THE TECHNIQUES OF FICTION

  One summer I taught a class in techniques of fiction at a midwestern university. About halfway through the course, one of the students came up to me after class and said, “I do hope you’re going to teach us something about writing for children. That’s really why I’m taking this course.”

  “What have I been teaching you?”

  “Well—writing.”

  “Don’t you write when you write for children?”

  “Well—but isn’t it different?”

  No, it is not different. The techniques of fiction are the techniques of fiction. They hold as true for Beatrix Potter as they do for Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Characterization, style, theme, are as important in a children’s book as in a novel for grownups. Taste, as always, will differ (spinach vs. beets again). A child is not likely to identify with the characters in Faulkner’s Sanctuary. Books like A Wrinkle in Time may seem too difficult to some parents. But if a book is not good enough for a grownup, it is not good enough for a child.

  SPECIAL ASSIGNMENT

  Several years ago Simon and Schuster, the prominent publishers, asked if I would be interested in writing a text to go with the glorious paintings of the life of Christ by the fourteenth-century painter Giotto.

  I was honored, challenged, thrilled, humbled. “Yes,” I said, “I’d really like to try it.”

  The editor who had thought of the idea for this book took me out to lunch. “Now,” he said, “we see this as a children’s book.”

  “Halt!” I said. “Wait a minute! Think! Remember that Simon and Schuster was one of the publishers who rejected A Wrinkle in Time because it was considered too difficult for children. Don’t you think children can understand the life of Jesus? Do you want it watered down? Made pretty? Do you want a book about a wimp? I am not interested.” Finally I said, “Would you just leave me alone and let me write a book?”

  WRITERS WRITE FOR THEMSELVES

  Whether a story is to be marketed for grownups or for children, the writer writes for himself, out of his own need, otherwise the story will lack reality. There is no topic which is of itself taboo; if it springs from the writer’s need to understand life and all its vagaries and vicissitudes, if it is totally honest and unselfpitying, then it will have the valid ring of truth. If it is written because it is what is at the moment fashionable, and not out of the writer’s need, then it is apt to be unbelievable, and what is unbelievable can often be shocking and even pornographic—and this includes some recent children’s books.

  NO SUBJECT IN ITSELF IS TABOO

  When I was a child I browsed through my parents’ books when I had finished my own. What was not part of my own circumference of comprehension
I simply skipped; sex scenes when I was eight or nine had little relevance for me, so I skipped over them. They didn’t hurt me because they had no meaning for me. In a book which is going to be marketed for children it is usually better to write within the child’s frame of reference, but there is no subject which should, in itself, be taboo. If it is essential for the development of the child protagonist, there is nothing which may not be included. It is how it is included which makes its presence permissible or impermissible. Some books about—for instance—child abuse are important and deeply moving; others may be little more than a form of infant porno.

  BE HONEST WITH CHILDREN

  What the storyteller does is to look at the world with all of its brokenness and all of its problems and write a story. The story is where we look for the truth of a matter. I do not believe that we need to protect our children from language which they already know, from the horrors of the world which they already know. I think we owe it to be honest with them. This does not mean we ram facts down their throats or write about what is currently fashionable, but we work out of our own needs, our own concerns. And one of our chief concerns today is to try to catch up inwardly—spiritually—with all that has assailed us outwardly. This involves an acceptance of wonder and a moving into change.

  CENSORSHIP

  I am totally against censorship. The kids are going to read the books. You might as well accept that. It is much better to read the books with the kids and discuss them and bring them out in the open and let the kids see how lousy they are.

  I am totally against removing books from the shelves because they are unchristian or anti-religious or pornographic. I think we have no right to do that. We do not have to like everything we read. I do not have to approve of all that my grandchildren come home with, but I’d rather talk to them about it than pretend I don’t know it exists.

  I once received a newspaper clipping in which ten books were to be removed from the shelves because of their pornographic content, and one of them was A Wind in the Door. Now can anybody enlighten me? Do you know what is pornographic in that book? I haven’t figured it out.

  CHILDREN DESERVE A WRITER’S BEST

  “Why do you write for children?” My immediate response to this question is, “I don’t.” Of course I don’t. I don’t suppose most children’s writers do….

  If it’s not good enough for adults, it’s not good enough for children. If a book that is going to be marketed for children does not interest me, a grownup, then I am dishonoring the children for whom the book is intended, and I am dishonoring books.

  Section VI

  FINGER EXERCISES

  A Writer’s Technique and Style

  Nobody can teach creative writing—run like mad from anybody who thinks he can. But one can teach practices, like finger exercises on the piano; one can share the tools of the trade, and what one has gleaned from the great writers.

  PREPARE FOR INSPIRATION

  The artist knows total dependence on the unseen reality. The paradox is that the creative process is incomplete unless the artist is, in the best and most proper sense of the word, a technician, one who knows the tools of his trade, has studied his techniques, is disciplined. One writer said, “If I leave my work for a day, it leaves me for three.” I think it was Artur Rubinstein who admitted, “If I don’t practice the piano for one day I know it. If I don’t practice it for two days my family knows it. If I don’t practice it for three days, my public knows it.”

  EYES TO SEE

  Conrad says, “The novelist’s first task is to make us see.” To make us see not only the readily visible—the sunset over the Litchfield Hills, the snow falling, slanting in from the east, the tooth marks on the fresh-cut wood of a tree the beavers have felled. But also to see the less readily visible—the anger couched in exquisite courtesy, the self-sacrifice given in such a way as to be hardly noticeable, the carefully hidden anguish in the eyes of someone who has been betrayed. The novelist helps us to see things we might not notice otherwise. With a few strokes the biblical narrator shows the confusion of love and hate in Saul’s daughter Michal, the quiet wisdom in Abigail, David’s growth in honor and true royalty.

  TIME TO WRITE

  Believe me, I schedule my writing time. When I am at home, I work a nine-to-five day. I do not work steadily nine to five. Nobody can. Your bottom would get sore. I go off for a walk with the dog. But I put in a full workday.

  And my best work is done in the early morning. I prefer to work eight to four actually because I’m freshest in the morning. And also in the morning we are closest to our subconscious minds, our sleeping minds. We haven’t come all the way up from the surface of the subconscious intuitive mind into the limited conscious mind. So the early morning is the best time to write.

  THREE RECOMMENDATIONS

  Read at least an hour a day. I try to read something I feel I ought to read for most of the time, and then for a little bit of the time I read something just for sheer fun. Fun reading is important, and I think we underestimate reading for fun. I have fun reading the Bible. Nobody told me I was supposed to take it as a moral trap, to be serious and long faced about it.

  Part of your technique of writing is built up by writing, and with this you should also have some fun. I do think that keeping an honest, unpublishable journal is helpful. Include what you are thinking, what you are feeling, what you are responding to. Include what you are angry about that you heard on the news. Don’t talk about the news in terms of politics but in terms of your own life. What does this mean to you? So these are my three recommendations: read, keep an honest journal, and write every day.

  USE IT OR LOSE IT

  No writer, no matter how talented and brilliant, can afford to neglect hard work. A fine violin has to be tuned constantly. It doesn’t stay in tune by itself. And it has to be played, or it dies, quite literally. In Washington, D.C., there’s a very fine collection of ancient instruments, but they would soon be nothing but a worthless collection of dead wood and cat gut if the finest musicians, the Budapest String Quartet, for instance, weren’t brought in to play them regularly.

  WRITE FROM EXPERIENCE

  You must write from your own experience. There simply isn’t any other way to write.

  Stanislavski, the great director of the Moscow Art Theater, always taught his students that you have to act out of your own experience, that you cannot act anything you haven’t experienced. Once when he was doing a production of Othello, the young man who was playing Othello went to him in great frustration and said, “Mr. Stanislavski, you tell me I have to act out of my own experience. And Othello has to murder Desdemona. I never murdered anybody. How can I act out of my own experience?” Stanislavski just looked at him and said, “Have you ever gone after a fly?”

  DETACHMENT

  I read Chekhov’s letters and I was excited to come across “When you depict sad or unlucky people and want to touch people’s hearts, try to be colder. It gives their grief a background against which it stands out in sharper relief.” And he went on to say that the writer does and must suffer with his characters, but he must do this in a way that the reader doesn’t notice. The more objective, the stronger the effect.

  I’ve learned in my own stories if I have an emotional scene to write, if something is going to happen, if I’m going to kill off my character—and I get terribly involved with my characters—if I am emotional while I am writing the scene, it goes in the wastepaper basket. If when I’m writing it I go cold, quite literally—I’m almost not there, I simply write—then it will usually stand. It is something which happens to a writer or, I’m sure, a painter, a musician, to push you out of the selfish subjective and into a frame of mind where you can write something like that. It’s true in all forms of art.

  OBJECTIVITY IS IMPOSSIBLE

  I doubt if there’s any such thing as total objectivity. We listen out of our own skins, our own ears, see through our own eyes wi
th their various myopias and astigmatisms. A history of either the English or American Civil War will show a totally different war when told from the point of view of one side or the other. The villains of one book will be the protagonists of the other. The historian trying to show both points of view fairly is still caught within his own subjective interpretations. We come more closely to a clear view in the novels of Dostoyevsky, Robertson Davies, the plays of Shakespeare.

  DON’T THINK. WRITE.

  Discipline is essential in the artist’s life—one must rewrite, work, work, work. But when you start to write, don’t think. Write. If you think when you’re writing, it’s no good. You have to have done your thinking just as you have to have gone through the emotion. You get out on the other side of the emotion, and out on the other side of thinking, and you write.

  When you are at work, at play, painting or making music or writing a story, you don’t think. You are so intently focused on your story that that’s all there is. You are not thinking. It’s like really focused listening. When you are listening to somebody who is telling you a story about his or her life, something that has happened that he needs to tell you, you’re not thinking. You’re listening. If you’re thinking, you’re not really hearing what that person is saying. So if you’re thinking when you’re writing, you’re not really hearing where your story wants you to go.