It’s a question I was asked many times when I was out in the world supporting my books. Why do you write for children? And strangely, it was the question I found myself least equipped to answer. Why, as an adult, had I turned back to the world of children as my readers?

The only answer I could offer then was that the choice had seemed inevitable. I’d seldom thought of writing for a different audience. It was as though I had come into the world destined for this career. But that answers nothing. Nothing useful, anyway.

In an earlier blog, I mentioned one of the reasons I assume lies behind such a choice for most of us who choose to write for children. That we are setting out to heal some primal wounding, to play whatever it might be out again and resolve it this time through.

Such an intent to heal is never, at least in my experience, a conscious choice. We are, as another writer I once knew used to say, writing behind our own backs. Whatever struggle we take on—and story is always based on struggle—it is one we, ourselves, are still working to resolve. And it’s the seeking of that resolution that provides the energy to persevere through the long and often plodding process of assembling words into story.

We never—at least I never, and I think I can speak fairly confidently for most of us—take on that struggle because we are thinking about its connection to our own lives. If we did, in fact, our writing process would probably turn into conscious therapy, something with little relevance for anyone but ourselves. It is looking outside ourselves, reaching beyond our own struggle, and viewing the personal through the scrim of other that enables us to speak to a wider audience. And the more experience we have in writing that struggle, the farther we storytellers are usually able to move from the limited and limiting details of our own lives.

When asked that question, I had another answer, though, one I seldom spoke because I didn’t really understand it myself. That came from remembering a moment I experienced during my junior year in college. I was at the University of Missouri where I had gone for their highly regarded School of Journalism. I had chosen journalism because I knew I wanted to spend my life writing, but I was wise enough, even at that tender age, to know that I was unlikely to earn a living with the kind of writing that called me. Journalism seemed a practical choice.

I discovered very quickly, though, that I had signed on to a trade school. That realization hit home most emphatically in a class on advertising. The professor, who told us with pride that he had what was, at that time, the only Ph.D. in advertising in all the world, also told us on the first day of class that advertising was the ultimate force, even the ultimate good propelling our entire society. I knew little then about what I believed, but I was certain the good he was holding up wasn’t one I was searching for. I dropped my journalism classes to devote myself to literature, philosophy, and even to my first and only class in writing the short story.

The focus of that last class was, of course, on writing for an adult audience. If it had occurred to me then to write for young people, and it didn’t, I’m certain whatever I produced would have been disdained. But one day, when I was supposed to be doing ten other things, as college students are always supposed to be doing, I ran a fresh sheet of paper into my typewriter and banged out a small paragraph that had no purpose, no intended audience at all.

It was a sudden, sharp memory, of being very young, perhaps three, standing barefoot on the sunny sidewalk in my backyard, then stepping off into the cool tickle of the grass. That’s all. Nothing more. But something about those few sentences captured my heart. That brief description stayed with me in a way that none of the short stories I produced for class did, stories that were later picked up for awards by the University’s literary magazine. The paragraph itself has long been lost. I doubt that the piece of paper it was on came home with me at the end of the term. But the experience of writing it still lives in my heart.

And more than a decade later when I decided for the first time to try aiming my incessant writing toward publication, those few words were still there. They felt important in a way nothing else I had written had. I couldn’t have said why. What’s the big deal about bare feet on a hot sidewalk? The cool relief of the grass?

I did understand, though, that I was meant to be inside the child I had once been, to experience the world through her skin. And though I knew little about children’s books except for hours and hours of reading to my own two young children and to several foster children as well, the feeling behind that brief paragraph seemed a place to start.

This was where I belonged. Inside a young child. Why? I couldn’t have said. Nor did I go poking to discover the reasons behind the gift. I simply journeyed there whenever I sat down to write.

Is there a more penetrating answer to that question? “Why do I write for children?”

Probably. I’ll explore it further another day, hoping my rummaging might prove useful, or at least interesting, to a few of you out there.

Why Write for Children?

Tiny Forces