An adult presence in a child’s story

When I began writing fiction for young people in the mid-seventies, I had absorbed one of the most basic rules for such books through reading contemporary novels for young people:  keep the adults at bay. No comforting–or scolding–adult voices narrating the story as was standard in the 19th century. In fact, few adults allowed on the scene, certainly none solving the kids’ problems for them. My protagonists were out there on their own, making their own discoveries, solving their own problems. In fact, in some of my stories, the adults at hand were the problem.
And so in everything I wrote for many years I moved in close to my main character and stayed there, inhabiting my character deeply and making his or her world the only view my readers had. But then that changed. I didn’t ask it to change. It just did. Something was happening within me that began impacting what landed on the page. I still wanted to inhabit a world of young people. All that can befall children and young adults feels important to me in a way that the happenings of adult lives do not. But I found myself wanting to enter the child’s world as an adult voice: commenting, assuring, revealing. Doing exactly what late 20th century writers were not supposed to do.

Might the “rules” be different for the 21st Century? I didn’t know. And truth be told, I didn’t much care. I work hard at being in control of my craft, but I am much less in control of something called “voice.” And the voice that was beginning to rise up through me was a distinctly adult one. An adult voice in a child’s world.

And so I wrote A Very Little Princess:  Zoey’s Story. And without my asking, an adult simply stepped in and told her story. I didn’t know where she came from, but it seemed to me that she was needed in Zoey’s painful world, for wisdom, for comfort. When my editor asked me for a prequel, naturally the narrator returned to tell A Very Little Princess: Rose’s Story.

I asked few questions. I simply wrote the stories as they came to me. And it was well after both books were completed that I made a discovery. I took a Wendell Berry novel off my shelf to reread and instantly fell into a world of familiar comfort. A deep wisdom undergirded the story. A subtle but all-pervasive narrator gave this created world meaning.

And then I remembered. A Wendell Berry novel had held me in its embrace during the days I sat in my adult son’s hospital room while doctors struggled toward a diagnosis for his debilitating and ultimately fatal illness. Afterwards, when I wrote the two Princess books, I was no longer remembering that novel,  and I didn’t think of it once when the much more explicit narrator’s voice for the two Princess tales presented itself to me. But when I held Berry’s novel in my hands again, I knew that the comfort that voice had brought me had also brought my own narrator.

If you are born a piece of granite, the slow and inevitable erosion of the world presumably brings no pain. If you are born of flesh and bone and blood, pain is inevitable. After living through my son’s decline and death, I found myself needing to bring comfort in my stories . . . at the same time I had no choice but to choose stories that acknowledged the pain.

When I moved on to Little Dog, Lost, the narrator moved with me. It’s a much less painful story. It is, in fact, a story of a small, safe town, of good people trying to do the right thing, of happy—if not perfect—endings for everyone.

And I love that narrator and all the reassurance and richness her voice can bring. In fact, whether the rules for writing for children are changing or not, I love being an adult presence in my own story.

Thank you, Wendell Berry.