Children’s Stories

Children’s Stories

 

Writing a children’s story or novel is an entirely different ball game to writing for adults. The author who decides to write for children must possess the unique quality of returning to that stage in life when innocence, energy and excitement at little things, reigned supreme. This can mean a return to the elements of human awareness and a movement away from the more complicated mannerisms and strategies humans acquire in adulthood.

Children’s stories often rely to a large extent on the magical realms of experience. Being more innocent, children allow their minds to drift more easily and quickly into a willing suspension of disbelief than adults do. This gives to children’s stories so much more scope because nothing is impossible in a children’s tale. If a fairy godmother changes rats into horses and a pumpkin into a carriage, it is not considered unbelievable or absurd, but rather something that could be the natural outcome of suppressed desires.

It follows that children’s stories are based on hope and a total absence of the contemporary disease called depression. Conversely, it may be said that if adults could revert back to that childlike stage in which magic and hope are so central to life they would probably escape this contemporary disease and be relatively healthy.

Great writers like Shakespeare, Jonathan Swift, Jane Austen, Dickens, Lewis Carroll, George Orwell,  Khaled Hosseini and some others have introduced the element of children’s stories into adult writing and blended the two in a a fine mix and thus enriched the literature for adults.