One thing I realised at the outset was that this was a branch of writing entirely dominated by adults. It must be the only branch in which a writer cannot address his/her audience directly.In order to say something to readers of fifteen and under, I (who am an adult) must first speak to an agent (who is an adult) then a publisher (who is another adult), a reviewer (who is an adult whose brain hurts), a bookseller (again an adult), and if I can make it through this barrage, then the book is usually bought by teachers, parents and librarians, all of whom are adults too. All these people have preconceptions about what should be in this book - preconceptions brought about by their own early reading an their upbringing - and they are going to, quite inevitably, exercise an unprecedented degree of censorship over this book.Now there is a strong plus-side to this: this phalanx of adults is going to insist on high quality. They are not going to let me, or any writer, get away with shoddy, unclear language, or a story that does not make sense, nor the whimsical changes of size that so worried me about Toad. Rather more importantly on the plus side, is hat what I write, just because it has to speak to adults too, is going to be written on two levels at least - maybe more. This is something I shall come back to. For the moment, I want to look at the minus side.
The minus side is that many adults are going to make all sorts of insanely wrong assumptions about what should go into a good book for young readers. When I first started writing, man of these assumptions were elevated into rules - nay laws! - which you broke at your peril. I broke most of them very deliberately, because they were truly absurd. For instance, all adults in your story had to be godlike and above reproach. This applied particularly to parents […] The only adults allowed to have faults were baddies, and they had to be killed at the end of the book even if all they had done was purloin the family silver. Now the absurdity here is that, just as children’s books are adult-dominated, so are children themselves. On my rough reckoning, most children spend two-thirds of their waking hours dealing with parents at home and teachers at school - and only spend the remaining third of their time in that ideal world of the old-type children’s book, entirely composed of other children. And as everyone knows, adults are by no means flawless - especially if they happen to be divorcing - and children have to deal with a lot of that. So I put adults in my books who behaved like real people do (and didn’t get killed for it). This worried publishers. Even worse I also allowed these adults in the story to perceive that strange thins were happening to the children and - worse! - to become involved in the strange things too. You wouldn’t believe how many publishers turned down The Ogre Downstairs for that reason. I admit this is an extreme case, since the Ogre does nearly get murdered, twice, by magical means. But what really bothered the publishers was not that. It was that the Ogre got involved. Adults were supposed to be sacrosanct.
This ties in with the next unwritten law from those days. I had a number of books turned down at that time because I didn’t say what ages the children in them were. This was another deliberate flouting of rules. You were supposed to say. My most obvious reason for not saying was that you feel a fool, if you are a mature twelve, if you discovered you have been eagerly identifying with a character who turns out to be five years old. But there is a more important, hidden reason which comes out if you consider the situation in C.S. Lewis’s Narnia books. Lewis doesn’t say what ages his children are either, but there comes a point where Peter and Susan, the two elder ones, are unable to enter Narnia because they are too old. Susan is specifically stated to have begun - horrors! - wearing makeup and thinking of boys. But, oddly enough, four adults are able to enter Narnia. These are two outright villains and two industrious working people. Nobody else gets to Narnia unless they are dead. Now, I know Lewis was certainly thinking in religious terms - no one shall enter the kingdom of heaven unless they become as a little child - but the land of Narnia, is, in spite of being an allegory of heaven, to most readers pre-eminently the vivid land of imagination. So what Lewis has ended up implying is that only young children, criminals and the uneducated working class can be allowed to exercise their imaginations. I think this has come about because, as well as thinking of Narnia as ehaven, Lewis supposed himself to be keeping the rule that adults are not to be involved in children’s books. But because he was gifted with penetrating intuition, he has in fact uncovered the basis for both the first rule and the second: which is that no one past puberty should have anything to do with fantasy.
In other words, after the age of fourteen at the most, you have to close down one very large area of your brain.
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