What Stories Do

May 2006I should have anticipated the question. After all, I’ve been asked it so many times before. But it caught me—as it always does—by surprise.

“What,” the reporter asked (it was his very first question in the interview), “do you want children to learn from reading A Bear Named Trouble?”I flinched. I knew it wasn’t meant to be a trick question. The reporter was interviewing me because two of my books, the novel, A Bear Named Trouble, and the picture book, If Frogs Made Weather, had been nominated for Minnesota Book Awards. I was honored by the nominations and grateful that my books were getting the special attention of a newspaper article. But he might as well have been asking me if I had written the novel so that kids could learn how to spell words like bear.“I don’t write fiction in order to teach,” I told him, somewhat primly, I’m afraid. “I write stories so that my readers will feel.”And that is true as far as it goes. But I kept thinking about it afterwards, the young reporter’s question, the suppressed irritation of my answer. I kept thinking about all that his question implied and about all my answer failed to say.Of course, I hope my readers might learn something from my stories. First, because I often have to learn a great deal myself before I can begin to write them . . . in this case about bears in the wild and about this bear, in particular, a young male that had defied all reason by breaking, repeatedly, into the Alaska Zoo. (This particular story was based on a series of real events surrounding a very real bear.) Second, because I have lived for what is beginning to feel like a rather long time, I have learned a few things along the way, and I hope that some bit of wisdom finds its way into all my stories. And yes, I hope that my stories increase my readers’ understanding of the world and of themselves . . . any readers, young or old. That is, after all, what good fiction does, whatever audience it is intended for.Someone else asked me a question about A Bear Named Trouble, someone else who had a clear idea of what stories for children are meant to do.She wanted to know why I had allowed Jonathan—a young boy and the main human character in the story—so foolishly to confront the bear. In the story, Jonathan’s father objected to his behavior, too . . . strenuously.“How could you?” he [Jonathan’s father] said, over and over again. “How . . . could . . . you? You might have been killed.”And even Jonathan knew what his father said was true. When he had stood, almost nose to nose with Trouble, when he had seen the desperation in the bear’s eyes, he knew he had made the wrong choice. The young brownie might have swung at him as easily as he had at Mama Goose, and a boy would have about as much chance against such a blow as a too noisy goose. Everything had worked out, yes, but still he knew that he had made the wrong choice.And how glad he was to be alive to know it.I could only respond by saying that I don’t write stories in order to create models for behavior, that if characters in stories always did what they should, we would have few stories . . . certainly few interesting ones. And yet I knew that my answer would not satisfy my critic any more, I’m sure, than my other answer must have pleased the reporter.There is no question. Our children are hungry for good examples, for a clear understanding of “the way.”When my daughter, Beth-Alison, was about seven or eight, I decided it was time to read Little Women to her. She was, after all, named after the character Beth. So one evening I settled onto the bathroom floor next to the tub while she was taking a bath, opened the book and started to read. I hadn’t read the novel myself for many years, and I didn’t get very far before dismay crept in. Surely my daughter wouldn’t want to listen to such preachy stuff! But when I shut the book for the evening, I discovered that Beth-Alison was, to my amazement, quite entranced. I was even more amazed to leave the bathroom and find her brother, two years older, with one ear pressed to the door . . . listening intently.I’m not sure it’s kids who object to didactic stories. At least not when they are young. But I want my stories to do something more for my young readers than they may want for themselves. I don’t want simply to teach kids “the way,” whether it’s the way to behave around bears or the way to think about religion. I want them to climb inside a situation and feel it to its limits and, consequently, to grow with it.I want them to come through the story of the death of a best friend unscarred, because the death, after all, wasn’t their best friend and they don’t carry the burden of the bad choices made. But, nonetheless, when they put down On My Honor I want them to be larger than they were before they read it.Will they have learned something? I hope so. And if they do learn not to swim in forbidden rivers or to confront wild bears, well and good. But nothing pleases me more when I read a novel than to feel that the characters, the story, the author’s understanding of the world are becoming a small part of who I am.It’s what I wish for my readers, too.