From a pretty young age, I knew I wanted to be a writer. I didn’t know what kind of writer I wanted to be, though. I thought maybe I wanted to be a poet or maybe a novelist or maybe even an academic who would write both sort of academic studies of books but also maybe literary criticism that was for a general audience. I had no idea. I kept switching.
It wasn’t until I started working with kids that I figured out I wanted to write for kids. I worked at a summer camp for four to six-year-olds, and it was a sports—themed summer camp, and I was in charge of the four-year-olds, because the four-year-olds were the worst at sports, and I was also the worst at sports, and so we were combined, matched up with each other, because the four-year-olds would get very disappointed when they couldn’t dribble a ball around a cone, which I also couldn’t do.
And so they would come to a tree with a lot of shade where I would already be sitting, and I would make up stories and tell the stories to kids. And I loved it. The stories I was telling to these kids were really fun for me. I was getting to exercise sort of all of the technique and fun but also real rigor, real good storytelling, and they were going over very well.
And sort of the strange stories that were in my head, the stories I loved to read, I was so amazed with how much these kids loved them. And it was my first moment where I saw that kids actually are great readers and understanders of stories, especially challenging stories, experimental stories, literary stories, that sort of literary bargain that we ask somebody to make when there’s a piece of literary fiction.
Right? We say we’re going to withhold some of the easy pleasures of reading, but in return we’re going to give you this other thing. But it’s going to be uncomfortable. I think adults are much worse at taking that bargain than kids are. So much of being a kid is uncomfortable, and you don’t know the rules, so experimental fiction is great with kids, because childhood is experimental. You’re constantly having to learn new sets of rules.
So a book that’s all in unattributed dialogue – that’s going to be really hard. I love those books, but the first few chapters for me – they’re really tough. But I think as adults, we really don’t like that feeling. We think, this is hard for us, and we automatically think, what’s hard for us – that’s going to be even harder for a kid.
Actually, it’s going to be easier. They’re much more practiced at that, because, you know, you’re constantly learning new rules, not just with books, but in social settings. You know, dinner with your mom at the house is very different from dinner at a restaurant with your mom, which is a completely different set of rules from dinner at your house with your mom and your mom’s new boyfriend, when all of a sudden you’re in trouble and she’s like, we don’t tell that story in front of Kevin.
You know, like why don’t we tell that story in front of Kevin? And then you’re like, there’s something interesting about that story, and you think about that, and you learn something from that. And that’s all literary fiction is. It’s dinner with Kevin. You know, it’s some weird thing that you have to figure out, but you’re trained to do that.
So I was so excited about the kinds of stories that I was telling to kids and how deeply they seemed to understand them, and that’s honestly my primary training, more than editors, courses I took in college – more than anything, I’ve been trained by telling stories to kids, and I always bring my books in front of kids.
I figure if I’m asking a teacher to stand up in front of a group of kids and read one of my stories, I’d better be willing to do it myself and know how it reads. And so being in front of kids has informed my work so deeply.