Why I'll never write a kid's book

Periodically, I think, “I should write a children’s book! Like my own quirky little spin on a Narnia-type world.”

Then I remember that I could never actually write for children, because I know too much about what they actually enjoy.

Because, let’s face it...kids will sit still for Narnia. They’re happy to take Narnia, if that’s what you’re offering. But...there are other stories they would enjoy much more, if you’re willing to tell them.

I know this because I actually do tell stories to my own child, Winnie (not her real name). And these stories are extensively play-tested. Every line of these stories has been tweaked. There is no excess weight in these stories. And they kill.

Winnie would happily listen to these stories endlessly. She has spent much more time in my make-believe world than she’s spent in Narnia or on the Wild Robot island.

So I know exactly the kind of thing that kids enjoy. But...it would be very hard to get these stories published.

You know why? Because of...of...of elitism! Because children’s book editors insist on publishing books that are ‘good’ and have ‘values’ and don’t really want to face the dark truth about what kids actually want to read.

And what is it that kids love? Well...I’ll tell you.

Winnie and Liam

Once upon a time, there was a little girl named Winnie who lived in a treehouse on another planet. And she lived in this treehouse with her best friend Liam, and with his older brother Henry and a plethora of animal friends who are too numerous to relate (but I’m happy to list them in a footnote).¹

And these kids were five (Winnie), six (Liam), and seven (Henry). And they mostly spent their time frolicking and having fun with no supervision. But they had a problem. Their old babysitter, Chaga, was determined to track them down and bring them home to their parents.

It was a big problem, because they kept constructing traps to detain Chaga, and the trap would work for a while, but then Chaga would come back!

Liam was ready to throw in the towel. He said, “I just heard that Chaga broke out of our last trap. And I’m really worried. Maybe we should just give up. There’s no use. There’s nothing left to do but go home to our parents.”

And Henry agreed with him. “Liam is right. We should go home.”

But Winnie said, “No! We can’t quit! We can’t give up!” And she shook her two friends by the shoulders, and she said, “We’re going to make the biggest, most incredible trap yet. And this time it’ll definitely work.”

“What is it?” Liam said.

“It’ll be a glue trap,” she said. “We will fill a huge pond with glue. And then we will take her favorite piece of jewelry, and we will put it on the glue, and she’ll think, ‘Oh I can just get it off the top maybe with a stick’ But the glue will be too sticky, and it’ll stick to the stick and then to her, and she’ll just get sucked to the bottom. She won’t die, but she’ll be there forever.”

The two boys agreed. So all the kids took a spaceship to the glue planet, where they did a series of tests to get the council of gluenies to give them a tanker of glue. And then when they came home with all the glue, Chaka was almost there! So they raced against the clock with the help of all their animal friends, and finally...the pit was constructed.

And Chaka was about to snatch them up, but then she saw, “Wait a second why is my necklace on that pond?” And then she reached out to get it and fell into the glue and was trapped.

The End

Developing my masterpiece

I tell this story to my daughter every night. Three times a night, actually, with increasingly baroque traps. Every night, I’m like, “But don’t they want to see their parents eventually?”

“No!”

So that’s where we are. I personally don’t love this story. It’s not to my taste. It started out one year ago as a very normal story about how when my daughter is at school I babysit for a mischievous kid named Liam who gets into lots of trouble. It had a moral! Liam did mischief, unlike my daughter, who is good. It was meant to teach her not to do mischief.

Then one day she was like, “I wish that I could meet Liam!” I thought...okay, I can work with that, so I added ‘Winnie’ to the story.

Then for a while he was encouraging Winnie to do mischief (which they’d blame on his brother Henry). And it just evolved in this crazy way. I did not choose any of these elements: I have no idea why they’re on a different planet or where this evil babysitter came from. I don’t remember inventing her, ever. Chaga just appeared.

I have no creative ambitions invested in this story. If you showed me this story, I’d be like, “This is garbage. This is no Narnia.” (Believe me, the way I have written this story is word-for-word the same way I tell it to my daughter.)

But that is exactly how I know the story is good! It’s so seemingly off-beat that it could only exist if it really tapped into something. It’s just like slash-fic. Who would’ve thought straight women would be into this? It took many decades for the publishing industry to wake up to the idea of an m/m romance marketed to straight women, because it just didn’t seem like something that could work for a mass audience.

Winnie and Liam are similar. This story is exactly what kids want. But because it doesn’t seem good to adults, it’ll never get published.

Which is probably for the best. I don’t know that Narnia or Harry Potter can actually compete with this. If this story ever got published, I’d be a multizillionaire, but the whole genre of children’s literature would be finished.

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Source

1. The animal friends include:

• an eagle

• a giraffe

• several cats

• some mice

• a colony of ants

• a raccoon

All can talk, obviously. And sometimes a bunch of fairy friends make an appearance as well, because Winnie is also a fairy.